Open Loops vs PureKanban

Open Loops: Clarify Your Goals, Take Action, Reflect Designed for high-achievers and deep thinkers, Open Loops transforms the way you approach productivity. Inspired by Getting Things Done by David Allen, it helps you break overwhelming goals into actionable steps—so you can take control of your life without the mental clutter. With a simple tap, define your Open Loops—your overarching life goals—then create Subloops to map out the steps. Every loop contains Next Actions, keeping you laser-focused on the immediate step forward. By removing uncertainty, Open Loops eliminates procrastination and fear of getting started. Why choose Open Loops? Open Loops is more than a task manager—it’s a system for mental clarity and purposeful progress. • Eliminate overwhelm by structuring your biggest goals into manageable loops and next actions. • Instantly clarify what’s next—no more second-guessing what to do or where to start. • Reflect and refine your progress with built-in journaling and review tools. • Multiple views for flexibility—see your loops as lists, boards, or timelines to match your workflow. • Sync across devices—stay on top of your goals wherever you go. • Boost accountability by assigning tasks, adding deadlines, and tracking habits. • Integrate with your favorite tools like Google Calendar, Notion, and more. • Unlock deep focus by structuring your work and life with intention. Open Loops on Apple iOS • A beautifully designed interface that makes goal-setting effortless. • Stay aligned from your iPhone, iPad, and Apple Watch, with seamless sync across desktop. • Natural language input lets you create next actions in seconds—just type “email mentor tomorrow at 10am” and Open Loops handles the rest. • Personalized productivity insights help you track your progress and refine your approach. Start turning your ambitions into reality—one loop at a time.

PureKanban keeps your work in boards, and your boards in files you own. Every board is an ordinary Markdown file in a folder you choose — open the same folder in any editor and the work is still there, in plain text. GOALS, NOT ONE FLAT BOARD • A project holds goals. A goal is a board. And a task can expand into a board of its own — a sub-goal — so the work under it gets the same columns and the same detail as anything else. • When a sub-goal's tasks are all done, the task it grew out of is checked off and moved to the archive column of the board above it. Reopen the sub-goal and the parent task comes back, unchecked. • The cascade is computed across the whole workspace and each changed file is written once, so a chain of goals stays consistent without you maintaining it by hand. • One column holds finished work — the one you name, or Done, or the last one — and a goal whose tasks all sit there marks itself achieved. ONE VIEW ACROSS EVERY PROJECT • The dashboard covers the whole workspace: what is due today, what is overdue, the next seven days, workload per person, tags, and progress for every goal and every project. • Date arithmetic is calendar-based in your own timezone, so a deadline never shifts an hour and lands on the wrong day. • Search every card in the workspace, filtered by @assignee or #tag. TYPE IT, DON'T FILL A FORM • Type "@alex ship it tuesday #launch" and the assignee, the due date and the tag are lifted out of the line, leaving a clean task title. English and Hebrew, including Hebrew weekday names. • Drag cards within a column, between columns, reorder the columns themselves, and drag whole goals into a project or back out to the workspace root. • Save, search, dashboard, new goal, new task, undo and redo from the keyboard — matched on the physical key, so they keep working under a Hebrew layout. BOARDS THAT ARE JUST FILES • Columns are ## headings. Tasks are checklist items. @handle is the assignee, a calendar emoji marks the due date, #tag is a tag. Standard YAML front matter, standard [[wikilinks]]. • The format is a strict superset of the Kanban plugin format used in Obsidian, so the same folder opens cleanly in both. Content the app does not understand round-trips untouched. • A top-level _people.md is the registry of who can be assigned; a current user is auto-assigned to new cards, and a filter shows only the cards you are responsible for. • A large workspace stays quick: a local index caches what the dashboard and search read, and it is a cache — deleting it is always safe. IT HOLDS UP UNDER SYNC • A file watcher notices a board that changed outside the app — another device, another editor, a sync client — and merges it card by card against what is on your screen. • A genuine conflict is kept beside your file as a .conflict.md copy. Nothing is silently overwritten. • Every save writes a temporary file, flushes it, and renames it into place, keeping a .bak of the previous content. A board whose front matter is malformed is shown read-only and is never rewritten. • A board that lives in iCloud but has not been downloaded is requested and read when it arrives, with coordinated reads and writes. FIVE INTERFACE LANGUAGES • English, Hebrew, German, Spanish and Japanese, following your system or your choice, and the choice is remembered. In Hebrew the labels, the dialogs and the text on every card read right to left, while the board keeps one column order in every language — a stage stays on the side you last saw it. PRIVATE BY CONSTRUCTION • No account, no server, no analytics, and no network requests at all — the app works the same in airplane mode. • The workspace is a folder you pick. Every file operation is checked against that folder's root before it runs, so nothing outside it is read or written. • Free, with no in-app purchases and no subscription.