Plan deliberately from today to five years out, with rolling tasks, decisions, habits, focus nudges, and as many columns as your screen can hold.
WHAT'S DIFFERENT
Most productivity apps are slight variations on the same idea: a list, a date, a checkbox. Matters is built around a different theory of how a deliberate life gets organized — and the difference is structural, not a settings toggle.
ROLLING TASKS
Most apps treat a finished item as a thing to delete. A rolling task sinks to the bottom instead, and the thing it's been longest since rises. The list becomes a wheel that turns by itself. Perfect for any rotation that should never run out.
TASK TYPES
A grocery run, a habit, a decision you keep circling — different shapes of work, each deserving its own behavior. Matters gives you five, switchable on the same list with a tap.
Decisions get a log of their own. Filter your history to decisions only and read the year in choices — what you picked, and the reasoning you'd otherwise have lost.
PLAN
Plan is a matrix: your lists down the side, time across the top. The zoom sets the grain — Day, Week, Month, Year, or a year-by-month grid that puts five years on one screen. Long-horizon plans stop living in your head and start living somewhere you'll look.
Schedule a task as loosely or precisely as you want — a whole year, a month, a week of it, or an exact day.
TIME BLOCKS & ROUTINES
A time block is usually more than a task — it's a whole area of your life given a slot of time. When the block arrives, you don't plan, pick, or administer anything; you just work on that part of your life for as long as it's set aside. Stack blocks into routines — Weekday, Weekend, Travel — and the right one applies itself at midnight. A single task can also claim a block of its own when you need one, but time-blocked areas of life that matter never quietly get neglected.
FOCUS LISTS
Mark any list as a focus — Marathon, Spanish, the side project. Any day it has nothing planned, Matters slips a quiet chip into your agenda — a gentle nudge back to it, not an alarm or a guilt badge. Just: this still matters to you — want to give it something today?
COLUMNS
On a phone, you swipe between lists. On a Mac you have a real screen, and you decide how it's spent: pin Today next to Work next to Reading, cap the layout at any number of columns, or remove the cap entirely and let the screen decide.
THE WEEK
Every week in the agenda starts with a journal line you write yourself. It's the part of a weekly review most apps skip — not the tasks, the intent. The plan lives under it, the reason above it — and under each day, your calendar, tasks, and habits interleave by time.
BRIEF
Some lists are more than tasks. A project has meetings, decisions, and open questions. Brief gives any list its own operating page, so the context lives next to the to-dos, not in a doc you'll never reopen.
HABITS
A habit isn't just another checkbox. Each one keeps its own page — current and best streak, a consistency grid, and a month calendar — so "meditate ten minutes" becomes a record you can see, not a resolution you forget.
THE FAMILIAR, DONE WELL
A board and a focus timer aren't what set Matters apart — plenty of apps have them. But the tools you live in should get the ordinary things right too, so these are built to the same standard, on the very same tasks.
FOCUS TIMER
Start a timer on a single task when you know exactly what you're doing — or on an entire list to give a whole area of your life a slice of time, without pre-deciding which item gets it. A floating countdown rides above every window, and each task and list keeps a quiet history of its sessions.
KANBAN
Every list is also a Kanban board — drag tasks across stages, group them into swimlanes, and see the work in flight at a glance. List, Kanban, and Brief are just views of the same tasks; a card moved on the board is the same task in Today and the agenda.
AND EVERYTHING ELSE
The ideas above are the shape of Matters. Under them sit the ordinary things a tool you live in should get right — and a handful you might not expect.
Pin up to three photos to a task — quietly compressed.
Break a task into subtasks, each ticked on its own.
Jot a note; any URL in it becomes tappable on its own.
A local nudge at the time — or a few days before.
Flag a hard one — it warms to orange, then red when overdue.
Daily, weekly, monthly, yearly — with an end in sight.
Drop a task on a day to set it; multi-day spans move whole.
Today falls into time-of-day sections, not one long list.
Add named headings inside a list, and fold them away.
Everything done, grouped by today, this week, this month.
Full-text across tasks, notes, and tags — recent queries kept.
Move or clear a whole batch in a single gesture.
Events sit under each day, in their own calendar's colors.
Tie a task to a place; a nudge on arrival or leaving.
A quiet ping as each block of your routine begins.
Your focus countdown lives in the Mac menu bar.
Keep Matters above every other app on the Mac (⌘⇧T).
Shrink to a slim strip of just today (⌘⇧M).
Drive the whole app by keyboard; ⌘/ lists every shortcut.
Today's tasks, right on your iPhone home screen.
Bring your tasks over from a CSV, duplicates handled.
A full JSON backup or a CSV, whenever you want one.
Add, complete, or jump to a task via matters:// links.
Follow the system, or pick a mode per device.
WAYS TO USE MATTERS
Matters makes the most sense when a list is more than a list: a rotation, a long plan, a shared responsibility, or a part of life you want to keep honest.
Keep fourteen dinners in a rolling list. Cook the top one, complete it, and it sinks to the bottom while the meal it has been longest since rises back up.
Plan Japan for April 2027, a marathon build in 2028, and a sabbatical in 2029 without exiling the future to a spreadsheet.
Mark the areas of life and projects that matter most — Marathon, Spanish, a side project — as focus lists. More than a high-priority tag: any day you leave one unplanned, the agenda gives a quiet but unmissable nudge — so what matters never slips, and you plan the day around it.
Run a project from one column: tasks in List, progress in Kanban, and use the standing Brief for meetings, decisions, questions, and risks.
Give each area of life its own block of time — deep work, a side project, family — so none of them quietly gets neglected. When the block arrives there's nothing to decide: you just work that part of life for as long as it's set aside.
WHY MATTERS EXISTS
I didn't build Matters because I wanted another productivity app. I built it because nothing could hold a whole life at once — so for years I ran two apps and a spreadsheet just to keep one.
I'd tried every serious task app and hit the same ceiling each time. So I did what deliberate planners do — ran several at once, with a spreadsheet underneath for the long horizons none of them could hold: a trip I could only pin to “sometime in 2027.” Other things just fell through the gaps — dinners that should rotate through the month instead of vanishing the moment I cooked one, the reasoning behind a decision I'd want to reread in a year. A pile of tools, each holding one corner of my life.
The real problem was never a missing feature — any app could add the next thing I wanted. It was that nothing held it together. Tasks in one app, events in the calendar, horizons in a spreadsheet, habits in whatever app I was trying that month — and the stitching between them was the tax I paid every morning. I was spending attention keeping the system intact instead of on the work it was meant to protect.
What I wanted was the opposite. The day as one sequence — a task, a habit, a meeting, back to tasks — not parked in separate trackers. The areas I kept neglecting blocked out by the hour, so when the time came I'd just take the top thing and work. The lists that matter most not just flagged important and then forgotten, but speaking up on their own on a day I'd let them slip.
And planning years out shouldn't mean exile to a spreadsheet. A plan should be allowed to stay vague — “Japan, sometime in 2027” — and sharpen only as it nears. I wanted to zoom from this morning to 2029, and to keep my week and two live projects open side by side, instead of switching between views all day.
So I built it, and I've run every day and the next few years through it since. If you've ever bent a todo app into a life system and felt it bend back, this one bends the other way — shaped to your life, not asking your life to be shaped to it. Built by someone who needed that first.
Sina Keshavarzi, Stockholm
PRIVACY BY DESIGN
Matters has no backend that holds your todos. Sync happens through your iCloud account, end-to-end. We can't read your tasks, because we never see them.
You don't sign up for Matters. The only credential involved is the Apple ID you already use — the same place your photos and notes sync.
Share a single list with a partner or collaborator — the weekly dinners, the house projects — straight from Apple's share sheet, the same one you already use. They see that list; the rest stays yours.
The whole app runs locally. Lose connectivity — on a plane, in a tunnel — and Matters keeps working, reconciling when you're back.
Now on the App Store
Matters is here — one app for iPhone and Mac. Download it from the App Store today.
