ToADHDo

Reminders for ADHD brains, on Mac, iPhone and Apple Watch. The Mac app is here; iPhone and Watch are on the way.

Install

On macOS 14 or later, in Terminal:

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/dipa84/toadhdo/main/install.sh | zsh

Or download the .dmg from Releases and drag ToADHDo to Applications. The app is not notarized by Apple (no paid developer account), so the first time macOS says it cannot verify it: open System Settings › Privacy & Security and choose "Open Anyway". The Terminal line avoids that.

ToADHDo lives in the menu bar. It asks for Reminders (that is where it keeps your reminders, so they sync through iCloud) and for notifications.

What it does

People with ADHD forget when, not what: remembering to do something at a clock time is the weak spot, and alarms that always look the same stop being noticed. So ToADHDo:

• ties reminders to moments the device notices: when you open the Mac, when you leave, when you get home. A clock time works too.
• reads one sentence, in Italian or English: "domani quando esco ricordami il pacco", "chiama Marco alle 15", "stasera spazzatura, primo passo prendi i sacchetti".
• nudges until it is done, and never the same way twice: stronger over time, up to a window on the Mac screen an hour late; at most 24 interruptions a day.
• repeats: "ogni 2 ore bevi acqua", "ogni mezz'ora", "ogni giorno alle 9", "ogni giovedì alle 18", "every 30 minutes". "Done" moves it to the next round: minutes and hours count from when it was done (missed rounds do not pile up) and skip the night, 22 to 8; days and weeks keep their time.
• the dot fills up the longer you ignore it: empty until a reminder is due, then fuller with every nudge, orange, and red when full. One in the menu bar for the most ignored, one beside each reminder.
• "later" is a moment, never minutes: when you open the Mac, after lunch, tonight, tomorrow morning, when you leave.
• reminders without a moment are not left behind: "pagare F24" comes back when you are at the Mac anyway (opened, back from a pause, after two hours without one), "While you're here: …?", once a day the first week, twice the second, three times after, and as a window after two weeks. At most three of them a day; "not today" brings it back tomorrow.
• deadlines: "entro il 16", "entro venerdì", "entro fine mese", "by the 16th": it comes back more often as the day gets close, and on the day it nudges from the morning.
• shows the first step, not the whole task.
• logs what happened to each nudge (~/Library/Application Support/ToADHDo/log.jsonl), to learn which nudges work.

The reminders live in Apple's Reminders, in a list called ToADHDo: iCloud syncs them for free, without a paid developer account, and Siri and the Reminders app see them too.

Layout

• Sources/ToADHDoCore: shared by every device: the sentence reader, triggers, the nudge plan, the store on Apple's Reminders.
• Sources/ToADHDo: the Mac app, in the menu bar. The dot fills up as the next reminder gets close.
• Sources/toadhdo-tests: swift run toadhdo-tests.

iPhone and Apple Watch need Xcode: they will use ToADHDoCore as a local package.

Build

tools/make-certificate.sh     # once per Mac: a local signing identity, so permissions stick
tools/build-app.sh --install  # into /Applications, and starts it
TOADHDO_PHOTO=menu.png .build/debug/ToADHDo -AppleLanguages "(it)"   # a picture of the interface