Suppose I need to study for an exam, and I have a dentist appointment later in the afternoon. The appointment is on my calendar; studying is on my to-do list. I’d like to study for a few hours before I leave, but neither tool on its own shows me how studying fits around the appointment. I have to imagine how each item fits together to make up the day.

Early on I followed Cal Newport’s How to Become a Straight-A Student: each morning I would bridge the gap, combining calendar and to-do items on a single sheet of paper. But copying over commitments I’d already recorded was labor-intensive, and assigning a time to every item made the plan feel rigid.

I later moved to Things. It made the daily upkeep easier, and its calendar integration seemed promising. But the calendar felt tacked on: events were fixed at the top of the list while tasks sat below. I could see both in one place, yet I still had to work out how they fit together. I missed being able to interleave everything in one list, as I had on paper.

This led me to create Nagare, a to-do app built around the idea that calendar events and tasks are both commitments.

In Nagare, both are represented by a single kind of item, with an optional time.

You can put studying before the dentist appointment in one ordered list, leaving the study item untimed. The list shows how you intend the day to unfold without requiring an exact start time for everything. Timed and untimed commitments can sit wherever they belong in that order.

Bringing everything into one list also gave me a chance to recover the simplicity of my daily sheet of paper. I kept the colors and shapes simple, with only a few controls around the list. I took that restraint a step further by moving times and checkboxes to the right, so the controls stay out of the way of what you’ve written. The result is a page that feels almost like a handwritten note.

Lists also needed to reflect what makes a day successful: getting the few things that matter most done. Studying for the exam might be one of them. Items within a priority project have a subtle glow that draws attention back to those intentions whenever you return to the app.

As you use Nagare, your plans and completed items become a record of your intentions and follow-through: what you’ve planned, what you’ve completed, and what’s left to do.

Nagare syncs your data through iCloud and makes this context available to your agent through MCP. Your agent can draw on this context proactively to help you stay engaged with your goals. That could mean suggesting opportunities to meet people when your week has no social plans, or checking in when planned workouts repeatedly go unfinished.

I’m excited to share Nagare with you. It’s available for iPhone and Mac on the App Store.