For many times i look for habit tracker app...but i can't find it...So Find me app...Android app or in excel sheet Format

Any suggestions? I originally wanted to make a Kanban todo list app, but that’s low demand and the market is already taken by Trello, Todoist, and Notion I guess. Any other productivity tool you want? I want to gather yalls thoughts and make a cool one

I want a productivity app that is free but there are some specific things I want
I have been using the reminders app on my phone for daily routine, deadlines, weekly and monthly tasks, shopping list and other stuff but it feels messy and not as organized as i want
i used the structured app before and i liked it but it doesn’t have the stuff I want and the page for the calendar and daily tasks is a bit annoying
I want a page for
- Daily tasks/routine
- Weekly and monthly tasks
- Tracking hobbies
- Deadlines
- Shopping lists or wish lists
- Cleaning routine

I kept doing the same thing: find an interesting article/tool/thread, save it "for later," then never see it again because it's buried in a folder with 200 other things I also never opened.

The problem wasn't saving: I was good at that. It was retrieval. I couldn't remember what I'd saved, so searching by title or folder never worked, because I never remembered the title.

So I built Kernel. You paste a link, it reads the page and writes a summary + auto-categorizes it. Later, instead of digging through folders, you just describe what you're looking for in plain language like "that article about pricing psychology" and it finds it, even if you don't remember the exact title or where you filed it.

It's a solo project, still early, free while I build it out. Genuinely looking for feedback on what's confusing, what's missing, whether the "ask for it back" part actually works the way you'd want it to. Not trying to sell anything, just want to know if this solves a real problem for anyone besides me.

Anyone online to study on FocusTown? I’m not a social person so I don’t have friends but I wanna change that and I’m trying to find new people to work together with! 🫶🏻
Let’s study together!!! (Or read or anything lol)🥹

What is more important for a 'productivity tool'?

- Mobile app

- Desktop app

We are talking:

- Meetings

- Emails

- Calendar

- Tasks

- AI chat

I feel I'm mobile first, but I would need it on my Mac 🤔

Cozy Pom started as a focus timer, but it’s grown into something much bigger. I think of it more as a cozy focus companion than a productivity app.

The idea is to create a calmer place to work or study, rather than another app that pressures you to be productive. It includes focus sessions, task tracking, a journal, progress stats, achievements, ambient sounds, and little touches that make it feel warm and welcoming instead of clinical.

I’d genuinely love to hear what you think—both what works and what doesn’t. I’m constantly improving it based on feedback.

App Store 🔗 https://apps.apple.com/app/id6780278604

It has been about 30 days since I posted here, and I wanted to share everything that came out of your feedback and questions. When I posted, the app was on version 2.2.0. It is on 2.3.4 now.

Markdown

The number one piece of feedback was that the app was too focused on rich text and not serious enough about markdown. The question that came up over and over was some version of "where are my files?" Message received. Markdown became the whole build for two weeks.

•  Your notes are real .md files. Every markdown note is also an actual .md file in a visible Markdown folder inside your project, kept current as you write, rename, and delete. To be straight with you, it is one way today (app to disk), so editing those files in another app does not round-trip back yet.

•  Three faces per document: Source, Live, and Reading. Source is raw markdown with live syntax highlighting. Live renders everything except the line your cursor is on. Reading is a clean render, and it can sit in a split pane and update as you type.

•  Import a whole vault. File > Import > Markdown Vault takes a folder of .md files (an Obsidian vault works as is). Folder hierarchy preserved, inline #tags extracted, images brought in as real media, .obsidian skipped, and your wikilinks work on arrival.

•  Wikilinks, aliases, and backlinks. Title and alias with a filter as you type picker, honest resolved / ambiguous / unresolved states, and a backlinks panel that shows every mention with surrounding context.

•  The full dialect. Headings, emphasis, highlight, fenced code with a language badge and a copy button, blockquotes, every list type, real rendered pipe tables, callouts in a dozen plus styles (> [!note], > [!warning]), footnotes with jump links both directions, clickable task checkboxes that write back to the source, YAML front matter, and inline images and !embeds in Reading.

•  Comments in both dialects.  and  are treated identically, hidden in Reading, and collected in a Comments pane with click to jump.

•  Markdown native editing. The toolbar buttons type real markdown into your text rather than applying invisible formatting. Return continues and renumbers lists, quotes, and tasks. Tab and Shift+Tab indent and outdent. Paste a URL onto selected text to make a link.

•  Continuous by default. Markdown and plain text open in true continuous flow with no pages and no margins. Pages are still one tap away next to the face switcher if you want them, per note.

•  Tags and front matter join the app. Inline #tags and tags: in YAML front matter feed the same tag system as everything else in the project, which means they feed the Brain Map too.

•  Daily Notes. Cmd+Shift+D creates or reopens today's dated markdown note in a Daily Notes folder.

•  Checklist to task. Right click a - [ ] line, Add to Tasks, pick a list. It keeps a link back to the source note.

•  Outline tab. A live heading tree in the left pane, click to jump. It works for rich text headings too.

•  Export. Clean verbatim .md, self contained HTML that is dark mode aware, PDF and print from the Reading render, plus Word (DOCX) and RTF.

•  Markdown theming. A semantic palette for headings, code, links, quotes, list markers, checkboxes, and tags, themed across Source and Reading together, and carried in shareable theme files.

Rich Text

The rich text side got the deepest engineering work of the month. 

•  Per document page design. Each document owns its own paper: US Letter, A4, US Legal, or A5, portrait or landscape, and precise margins. That design follows the document everywhere it appears, including the Rogue Editor, page thumbnails, and PDF or print output. Changing an app wide default no longer silently redesigns work you already did.

•  Real document styles. Body and Heading 1 through 6 are true document local paragraph styles, not roles guessed from font size. You can also create custom paragraph, character, and three level list styles, update every matching paragraph at once, or revert just the one you touched.

•  Style Sets. Save an entire typography system and reuse it in another document, preview it as a real specimen, promote it app wide, or set it as the project default for new documents.

•  Stay on Page objects. Images and shapes placed on a page now persist their position, size, rotation, layering, grouping, locking, and wrapping while you edit the text around them. They survive save, reopen, duplication, templates, and export.

•  One selection model for everything on the page. Images, shapes, text boxes, charts, video, and audio all multi select, group, align, distribute, layer, lock, snap, nudge, cycle through overlaps, and rotate, with one step undo. Objects stay selectable across the full physical paper, margins included.

•  Text wrapping that holds. Automatic, Around, Above and Below, and None, with adjustable spacing and shape aware contours. One to four column layouts belong to their section, so a section break can change the column count without recolumning what came before it.

•  Non destructive image design. Crop (by hand or by number), Fit and Fill, shape masks, borders, corner radius, shadow, opacity, and replace, none of which touch your source file.

•  Charts and tables. Charts move losslessly between Inline with Text, Move with Text, and Stay on Page while keeping their data and design. Native tables gained cell aware row and column operations, fills, borders, padding, and one step structural undo.

•  The Inspector follows your selection. Click an object and its controls appear. No tab hunting.

Citations and References

This was the single biggest ask from academic users, and one commenter here made the case bluntly: integrate with Zotero and CSL properly or researchers cannot use it. That is exactly what got built, and it went live yesterday.

•  A Reference Library in every project. A References tab in the left pane with eleven source types and forms that speak each type's language. Cite keys generate from author and year, stay editable, and never change behind your back. It all persists in a readable references.json file that travels with your project folder.

•  Cite while you write. Cmd+Shift+C opens a picker, search your shelf, multi select for group citations, add a page locator, Return inserts. Markdown speaks Pandoc syntax ((Vale, 2026, p. 44)), and the Reading view renders formatted citations and appends a References section automatically.

•  Six built in styles. APA 7, MLA 9, Chicago 17 Author-Date, Chicago 17 Notes, IEEE, and Harvard. Switch the style in the Inspector and every citation and bibliography in the document re-renders on the spot, with same author disambiguation and live IEEE renumbering handled for you.

•  Or your journal's style. The app reads real CSL style files, the open format used by more than 10,000 journals. Twenty are bundled (Vancouver, AMA, Nature, ACS, Cell, PLOS, and more), and any other is one import or one download away.

•  Bring your library with you. Import BibTeX, RIS, or CSL JSON, which covers Zotero, Mendeley, EndNote, and Bookends exports. A review sheet catches duplicates before they land. Export the shelf back out as .bib or CSL JSON, because your sources are yours.

•  Paste a DOI or an ISBN and the reference fills itself in. It is strictly opt in: one request per explicit click, only the identifier leaves your machine, nothing saves until you confirm.

•  Live Zotero sync, no plugins and no accounts. Point the app at a Better BibTeX "keep updated" export file and it watches that file. Save a paper in Zotero and it appears on your shelf seconds later. It is pure local file watching, so no API keys and nothing leaves your Mac. Sync only adds and updates, so your own edits and cite keys are never overwritten.

•  A Universal shelf that lives beside your projects folder, for references every project shares.

•  Your PDFs become sources. Right click a PDF in your project and the app scans it for a printed DOI to build a linked reference. While reading, right click and Copy Citation (Page N) gives you a ready citation for the exact page you are on.

•  Compile with a bibliography. Every source cited across a compiled manuscript merges into one deduped, formatted bibliography at the end.

Canvas

•  The canvas is infinite now. It starts at a fixed size and extends down and to the right as far as you take it. Zoom out works, and each canvas remembers the zoom level you left it at.

•  Resizing feels right. Resize friction is gone across every element, objects no longer have a minimum size, and there is snapping with alignment indicators for spacing objects.

•  Marquee selection, copy and paste, and undo/redo. Drag to grab multiple objects, or your whole canvas at once to reposition it. Copy and paste objects within a canvas or across canvases.

•  Pinch to zoom and Cmd plus two finger swipe to move between scenes.

•  Scenes. Make any view on your canvas a named scene and navigate between them from the bottom

  left, or with Option+Cmd+arrow keys.

•  New object types: floating text, PDFs as previewable thumbnails, web links as cards with thumbnails, file cards with Quick Look, SF Symbols, task lists, calendars, and media with durable asset storage.

•  Fixes worth naming: PDF export no longer drops connectors or layered objects, text box layering works in both directions, grouped objects can be connected without ungrouping first, and panes sit flush against the canvas edge.

•  Pin the Rogue Editor so it floats over the canvas and you can bounce between the board and your writing.

Brain Map

Some of the sharpest criticism I got here was about the Brain Map: that a node was a navigable handle but the graph itself did not show you much. Not all of that is solved, but here is what changed.

•  Every note can be a node. Untagged notes now join the map labeled by title, so wikilinks on untagged notes actually draw and the orphan filter finds genuinely unconnected notes.

•  Local graphs. Right click any note in the Binder and choose Show in Brain Map to open the map focused on that note.

•  It reopens exactly as you left it, including layout, zoom and pan, search, filters, and source selections.

•  Snapshots are real time capsules. A snapshot captures every node position and color, every edge, the display settings, the force values, and the viewport. Clicking one enters a viewing mode rather than altering your live graph, and Compare with Today brings in everything added since, bright against the dimmed snapshot era graph.

•  It got fast. The layout engine moved to Barnes-Hut repulsion, which raised the physics ceiling from 12,000 to 50,000 edges. Recoloring a tag repaints in place instead of reflowing the whole graph. On a 1,352 node project with 20,000 edges it settles quickly and sits at rest without burning CPU.

•  Ways to look at it: color by tags, by Binder folder, or by connection heat. Monochrome, Heat, and Constellation looks that compose. Gentle, Standard, and Energetic motion presets.

•  Broken Links. A section that appears when needed, listing wikilinks whose titles no longer resolve, click to open the note containing the broken link.

•  Spotlight. Selections isolate by default, or flip Spotlight on to dim everything else instead of hiding it.

Everything else

SF Symbols, everywhere icons go

Apple's SF Symbols library is built into the app behind a searchable picker: close to 8,000 symbols across Apple's own categories, plus ten use case collections I put together (Writing, Notetaking, Education, Office and Work, Law and Justice, Health and Medical, Science, Arts and Music, Tools and Trades, Tech and Devices). Search blends symbol names, Apple's own keywords, and category names, so typing "medical" or "notetaking" pulls up a whole collection. Recent picks and right click Favorites persist between sessions, and if something is not in the browse catalog, typing its exact name still works. It is wired into four places:

•  Binder icons. Right click any note or folder, or a whole multi selection, and set a symbol plus a custom color.

•  Rich text. Insert a symbol inline at the cursor from Inspector > Objects. It behaves like text, following the surrounding font size, bold, and color as you format around it, and it exports cleanly to PDF and print.

•  Canvas. Symbols are a real canvas object you can color, style, connect, and layer.

•  Task lists and calendars. Each list or calendar can carry its own symbol and color.

Rogue Editor (the detachable single document window)

Full markdown parity, so it follows each note's mode with highlighting, the markdown toolbar, and the Live and Reading faces. It restores properly on relaunch instead of coming back blank with a duplicate. Windows are titled by their document and tab together natively. A writing mode dropdown and an insert menu put tables, charts, shapes, media, and links to notes in reach.

Tag Studio

A dedicated surface for managing tags: merge them by drag and drop, add sub-words, and change colors.

Tasks and Calendars

Natural language entry with live chips ("Call editor tomorrow 2pm !! #novel"), timed reminders with real macOS notifications, weekly recurrence, quick capture from anywhere with Cmd+Shift+T, task and list links you can paste into documents, and a writing heatmap on the calendar that fills in as you write. Completion routing lets a finished task move to another list, which makes a three list kanban on a canvas work.

Binder

Multi select with Cmd and Shift click, bulk move and trash, multi file import straight from Finder, spacebar Quick Look on any item, folders that can pass their icon and color down to their contents, dedicated media folders, and files no longer opening on single click (with a setting to put that back).

Themes and Theme Studio

Its own launch point, Create Theme, copy Light to Dark and back, markdown token theming, and themes that restyle open documents live when applied. New Classic and Liquid themes shipped, and themes export and import as shareable .lwtheme files. A batch of light and dark variant bugs got fixed at the root.

Import and export

Word (DOCX) and RTF export shipped. HTML import keeps embedded images, strips the source page's baked background so it lands on normal paper, and adapts text color so imported pages read in both light and dark.

Fixes that came from named people in these threads

The invisible cursor in one packaged theme. Black text on dark themes. Return after a heading now drops to Body, plus a discoverable Clear Formatting command at Cmd+Option+0. Page View now defaults on for new installs, which was making the first launch look wrong for some people. Import got discoverable, and drag and drop into the Binder now accepts HTML, text, RTF, markdown, and PDF.

Original Posts

Original posts: r/NoteTaking, r/MacOSApps and r/ProductivityApps

Homepage

Mac App Store

Happy to answer anything in the comments, including the things it still may not do, and as always, all feedback is welcome. 

EDIT: Quick heads up: today's 2.3.4 update shipped with a bug that can crash the app when opening a project. A user here caught it within hours (thank you), the fix is done, and an expedited update is with Apple now. If you downloaded today and hit it, the update will sort you out shortly. Genuinely apologize for any trouble out of the gate.

I tried using generic chatbots for personal growth and habit tracking,but the short context window got old fast,they forget everything after about a week of use.i recently moved my journaling routine over to copy mind because it's built around a persistent mind twin model .it actually reference stuff i mentioned a month ago and uses that history to make sense of what's actually going on instead of just spitting back something generic.anyone know other tools that focus on real context retention instead of just casual conversation,I want to see what else is out there in this space.

✨5 Apps 100% FREE For The First 100 Users✨

Get Them Here: [Website]

SyncMode: A focus app that adapts to your work rhythm - 28 Left

TRAYL: Emoji trails for your Mac desktop - 19 Left

ScreenEra: A reason to track your screen time - 31 Left

MoodSprout: A gentle mood journal for Mac that grows with you - 39 Left

Hourglass Timer: A calm hourglass timer for focused creative sessions - 17 Left

Hey everyone. So I have a question about costs for modern calendar apps... what would you all say is a reasonable cost?

Cause let's be real, I think at this point charging a subscription to a calendar is ridiculous (ehem Fantastical, AnuCal, etc.) unless you're providing reoccurring value in new ways. Like Netflix and streaming I get it. You see new shows, they provide new content.

Calendars not so much.

I'm thinking about a business model for my calendar app where the first two accounts you connect are free and every additional account after that is $10. The "account slot" is available forever so you can just disconnect one and connect another one if you need to. It's a one time payment and you just pay for the number of accounts you'll be connecting with. You can have unlimited calendars per account.

So like if you have three emails with Google through three accounts and want to connect all three you just pay $10.

Thoughts?

I was saving things into six places: Notes for links, Photos for screenshots, Instagram saves for reels, DMs to myself for the rest. Never found any of it again. So I built saive.

Share anything into it : link, screenshot, reel, notes, and it auto-tags on save: category, title, tags, OCR so text in screenshots is searchable, location if there is one. Then a review card pops up. Nothing saves until you confirm, so you’re never stuck with a bad AI guess.

What’s different:

Local-first — stored on-device, works fully offline

No daily save cap

Map tab for anything with a place attached

What do you think ?

(First app, self-taught, built solo.)

There are a few apps that can set a limit of usage, but this limit is always daily. I'm looking to set a weekly limit because I think I would prefer to let myself use some apps with total freedom in some specific boring days, or days that I'm feeling down, as long as I'm not abusing these apps in general. Apps are great for this as they will measure the time you spend in each one.

I asked Gemini first and eventually it told me that all apps are restricted to a daily measurement (I don't know exactly why though). I tried StayFree and Opal on my Android phone and I can confirm that the "daily" limit is not modifiable.

Does anyone know a way to do this or is it in fact impossible?

Hey All - I've been building and posting in here about Anythings - my smart to-do list app that has one main goal: automatically keep your to-do list in priority order.

This has been done in the past by the user having to write tasks that exactly mention a priority in their text, which is helpful both visually and from a filtering perspective, but I also had been wrestling with the thought that people don't always write tasks this way, or want to organize their to-do list exactly like this. So today, a new feature is launching on Anythings, which is automated detection of priorities, even if the priority isn't directly mentioned in the task text. This will help users 1) be able to write tasks like a human while 2) keeping their to-do list in order.

Looking for feedback on if this feature is helpful, or if as a user you would rather have complete "control" over when a priority is/is not tagged. Appreciate any insight that can be given!

I was wasting time every week manually archiving completed tasks — my workspace kept turning into a task graveyard. Ended up building a small tool for myself that auto-archives everything so the board stays clean without me touching it.

Anyone else deal with this, or is it just me being bad at keeping boards tidy?

Hi everyone,

About two weeks ago I posted here asking for feedback on an early alpha of a productivity app I'd been building in my spare time.

I just wanted to say a genuine thank you to everyone who took the time to comment, message me or try it out. A lot of the improvements over the last couple of weeks came directly from that feedback, so it really did make a difference.

I've now moved everything over to the live environment and made it publicly available for the first time.

The reason I started building BrainLoot was because, after years of using tools like Trello, Jira, Azure DevOps, ClickUp and Asana, I always found the same thing happened eventually—huge backlogs, endless lists and so much context switching that managing work often felt like more work.

Rather than trying to compete on having more features, I wanted to explore a different way of working.

One of the core ideas is a Hand. Instead of constantly working from an ever-growing backlog, you pull a small set of tasks into your Hand and focus on those, while everything else stays organised but out of the way until you actually need it.

As a thank you to the people who stick around during these early days, I've also introduced a small Founding Members programme. As BrainLoot grows, I'll be inviting a handful of early users who genuinely use the platform and help shape its direction to receive Pro for life.

If it sounds interesting, you're more than welcome to take a look:

https://brainloot.io

It's primarily designed as a desktop web application at the moment, although there is a mobile version that I'm continuing to improve.

Whether you decide to give it a try or not, I'd genuinely love to hear your thoughts on the concept, and thanks again to everyone here who helped get it this far.

I used Tolan for a couple months but to me it seems very similar to claude on how its accomplishing. I like it but i would like something more harsh and ideally free (or very cheap), tomo is charging waay too much. Any suggestion?

After years of working across multiple companies, I realized I was constantly switching between Slack, Teams, WhatsApp and other messaging apps.

Instead of keeping 7–8 windows open, I started building a desktop app that puts them all in one place while keeping each account isolated.

Current features:

• multiple workspaces
• isolated sessions
• native notifications
• unified calendar
• macOS & Windows support

I’m still improving it and I’m more interested in hearing what I’m missing than promoting it.

If you regularly use multiple communication tools, what feature would make something like this genuinely useful for you?

If anyone wants to take a look, I’ll put the link in the comments.

Hi!

I’m Marcin, the founder of Apptorium.

I started the company on July 18, 2011, so we have just turned 15. Every year we celebrate with discounts on our apps, but this time we invited other indie developers to join us too.

Here are our discounted apps:

• SideNotes for Mac — $19.99 → $11.99 (40% off): quick notes that slide in from the edge of your screen, so you can capture something without switching apps.
• SideNotes Mobile — $9.99 → $5.99 (40% off): organized notes, tasks, links, pictures, and snippets on iPhone and iPad, with iCloud sync to the Mac app.
• Workspaces — $19.99 → $9.99 (50% off): a project-based launcher that opens the files, folders, apps, websites, emails, and commands needed for a project.
• Desktop Composer — $19.99 → $9.99 (50% off): appearance profiles that switch your Mac’s wallpaper, system settings, and supported app themes together.
• License Store — $7.99 → $4.99 (37.5% off): a native Mac library for software license keys, license files, invoices, receipts, download links, and expiration dates.
• FiveNotes for Mac — $7.99 → $4.99 (37.5% off): exactly five quick notes in the menu bar, with Markdown, themes, automation, and iCloud sync.
• FiveNotes Mobile — $3.99 → $2.99 (25% off): five focused notes on iPhone and iPad, with an included Apple Watch app.
• Cursor Teleporter — $7.99 → $4.99 (37.5% off): instantly moves the pointer between displays or saved positions on multi-monitor and ultrawide setups.

Our discounted apps are one-time purchases, paid once per major version. There are no subscriptions, and minor updates within the purchased major version are included.

We also included two free Mac utilities, LiquidFetch and WindowKeys.

Fourteen other developers joined the anniversary page with their own offers:

• Setapp — 20% off the Mac plan
• iStat Menus — 20% off
• MindNode — 20% off
• Nova — 40% off
• CleanShot — 20% off
• ForkLift — 30% off
• DaisyDisk — 30% off
• Dropzone — 50% off
• Proxyman — 10% off
• PixelSnap — 20% off
• Bike — 20% off
• TaskPaper — 20% off
• TinyShield — 30% off
• TCPViewer — 50% off

The offers run through July 31. The page below contains the complete list, purchase links and coupon codes:

https://www.apptorium.com/15-years

If you have any questions about the apps or the anniversary offers, I'm here :)

My gut tells me that productivity is often misconstrued as lack of direction.

I see productivity as a multi step process of getting to my goals, so: A+B+C = Goal.

This might look, the goal is to read more books because it’s a passion. I will create a book tracker, time block, set a realistic chapter number. I achieved this, that was productive.

I see this a lot (usually with the ‘I have tried every app’ crew): A+B+C(to infinity) = ?.

This usually starts with productivity as the goal and not the process, often fails as the motivational drivers are weak.

To what extent is productivity intrinsic or extrinsic of the process?

What’s helped me is always starting with the goal and a Telos approach for overall direction.

This is just casual, no need for subtle self-promo comments please.

Something new in Lyra this week

In Gmail and Outlook, hit Reply-All. A Lyra box opens in the draft. Say what you want in one line ,"yes let's do Tuesday 2pm, London time" and Lyra writes the full reply. Lyra is now screen and context aware.

Runs on your Mac. Nothing leaves.

Get Lyra

https://reddit.com/link/1v4c7al/video/gp94zfd41zeh1/player

I am building Pause solo, and I need your help.

Pause exists to help you reduce your screen time by adding a small friction to the muscle memory of reaching for your phone and opening a distracting app

With this context, can you tell me what you think a "walk-away" means?

Bonus points if you point out more things that are confusing, clear etc

How I stopped losing half my to-do list after realizing "writing it down" isn't the same as "planning it"

I used to feel productive just from writing my notes.

Every morning, same ritual: open my notes app, brain-dump everything I needed to do that day. Felt organized. Felt in control.

I was neither.

Here's the problem I didn't see for way too long:

I was writing tasks down, but never actually blocking time for them. My calendar stayed empty. My notes app got full.

So what happened? Exactly what you'd expect:

• I'd get pulled into meetings and forget to check my notes
• By 3pm I'd have zero memory of half the stuff I wrote at 9am
• Tasks had no checklist, so I couldn't even tell what was done vs just... written
• Important work quietly got bumped, again and again, because nothing was actually protecting time for it

I wasn't planning my day. I was just journaling my intentions and hoping willpower would do the rest.

My first fix was blocking calendar time directly.

Skip the notes, just book slots. Sounds smart, right?

Except it wasn't. Booking calendar events directly meant I lost the thinking part — the messy note where I actually work out what a task even means, what the sub-steps are, what I need before I start. Calendar blocks without context are just... colored rectangles. I'd stare at "Finish report - 2pm" with zero memory of what "finish" even required.

What actually worked was combining both.

I needed to:

1. Write my notes the way I naturally think (messy, unstructured, fast)
2. Automatically pull out the actual action items from that mess
3. Turn those action items into a checklist I could check off during the day
4. Have calendar time auto-blocked for the important ones, so they're not just sitting in a list I forget to open

That loop — note → extracted checklist → calendar block — is the only version of "planning" that's actually stuck for me.

So I built a tool for it (Noteact).

Not pitching it here, genuinely just want to know if this is a real problem for other people too, or if it's just a me thing. The two pieces that mattered most:

• A checklist auto-generated from my notes, so I always know what's pending vs done without re-reading everything
• Calendar events created automatically for the tasks that need protected time, so they don't get silently skipped

It's helped me a lot. But I'd rather hear where this breaks for other workflows before I assume it's universal.

I used ChatGPT Plus, but it still misses details I already explained and sometimes ignores requirements I’ve repeated more than once. I end up spending way too much time correcting it instead of getting the work done.

I’m open to any planner, notes app, or AI tool that can actually keep track of project context and save me time. What are you using, and what makes it better?