ADHD Matrix vs Trace by Aura

I made this for myself. I have ADHD, and one long to-do list just freezes me. I can't tell what's actually on fire and what can wait, so I end up doing nothing. So I built the thing I needed, and figured some of you might need it too. Here's how it works. You write a task down before it leaves your head, then you put it in one of four buckets: - Do Now - Plan - Handle Soon - Later Four buckets. Not twenty lists, not folders inside folders. Just four places for a thing to go. What's in it: - Quick capture, so writing a task down isn't its own little chore - An Inbox for everything you haven't sorted yet - Recurring tasks: Daily, Weekdays, Weekly, or Monthly. You can also type a tag like @daily when you capture - Drag tasks into the order you want in Inbox and the Matrix - A Completed list, so finished stuff goes somewhere instead of staring at you - Siri and App Shortcuts, if you'd rather just say it out loud - Home Screen widgets, so your matrix stays visible without opening anything - Five curated color themes plus one custom palette. Curated themes stay contrast-checked in light and dark; a custom palette can keep the colors you pick even when contrast is low - Rename the four buckets to whatever your brain actually calls them - Optional private iCloud sync, so your tasks can show up on your iPhone and iPad - German, Spanish, Italian, and Simplified Chinese, with English as the fallback About your data: it lives on your device. You don't make an account, you don't sign in, and I don't run analytics or hand your stuff to anyone. The sync is your own iCloud, between your own Apple devices. It's free. No subscription, no ads. iPhone and iPad, iOS 18 and up. One honest note: this won't fix your brain, and I'd be lying if I said it would. It's just a small, quiet place to put your tasks that didn't make me feel worse to use. I built it by myself, around how my own brain actually works. That was the whole goal.

People don't forget information. They forget why it mattered. You save things all day. A reel, a link, a screenshot, a thought you did not want to lose. Weeks later you find them again and they mean nothing, because the reason you saved them is gone. Trace keeps the reason. SAVE IT, AND SAY WHY Share a reel, a link, a photo or a note into Trace, or capture a thought directly. Trace asks one short question: why does this matter? Your answer, in your own words, is the thing Trace protects. Skip the question and Trace says so plainly rather than inventing a reason on your behalf. IT SORTS ITSELF Trace reads what you saved on your device and files it. There are no folders to build and no tags to maintain. When it is unsure where something belongs it shows you its guess and lets you correct it in one tap. IT COMES BACK ON ITS OWN Trace watches for the moment a saved thing becomes useful again and brings it forward. When you wrote a reason, it shows you your sentence rather than a summary of it. When Trace is not sure, it stays quiet. Under uncertainty the correct behavior is silence, and Trace is built to prefer it. You choose how often it may interrupt and which hours stay quiet. Any memory can be silenced: it stays in your vault and stays searchable, it just stops arriving unasked. ASK YOUR VAULT Search by meaning rather than exact words. When Apple Intelligence is available on your device, Trace phrases what it found in its own words. When it is not, Trace searches with its built in engine and tells you so, instead of quietly getting worse. ON IPHONE AND IPAD Start on iPhone and continue on iPad. Trace hands off the memory you are reading, and on iPad it opens into a sidebar and split view, with Apple Pencil Scribble in the fields you write into. FROM YOUR APPLE WATCH Catch a thought on your wrist the moment you have one. Speak it and file it into a collection, or hum a tune and keep the raw audio, not a transcription of it. It reaches your vault through your private iCloud, and a voice memo plays back here and on your Mac, where you can save the file out. PRIVACY, WRITTEN AS A CONTRACT There is no Trace account and no Trace server. There is nothing to sign up for. Trace collects nothing about you, sells nothing, and carries no ads and no third party trackers. Reading and understanding happen on your device, using Apple's on-device intelligence. iCloud Sync is on by default, so a lost or replaced iPhone does not lose your vault. Your memories are kept in your own private iCloud, where they also appear on your other Apple devices. It is your iCloud account, not a Trace server, and Trace cannot read it. Apple manages the keys, so turn on Advanced Data Protection for the strongest protection. You can turn it off in Connections, and new memories then stay only on this iPhone. Link previews are off until you switch them on. When they are on, Trace fetches the public preview a page already publishes about itself, from a fixed list of sites. It sends the link and nothing else. Your notes and your vault are never part of that request. Privacy is not only about where something is kept. It is about where it shows up. A Lock Screen, a widget, a wrist someone else can see and a television in a shared room are not the same kind of place, and Trace treats each one as a decision rather than a default. You can mark a memory to appear only inside Trace, and it will stay off all of them. Export everything or delete everything, whenever you like. Deleting a memory also removes what Trace read from it, any transcript, and what it learned about its meaning. WHERE TRACE SHOWS UP Home Screen and Lock Screen widgets, StandBy, a Control Center capture button, Live Activities, Siri and Shortcuts, Spotlight, and a share sheet action from the apps you already save from. Trace is not trying to hold your attention. It is trying to give you back the reason you saved something, on the day you need it.