GSD Task Manager vs Driftnote

GSD ("Get Stuff Done") helps you answer one question: what should I work on next? Every task is framed on two honest axes — urgent and important — and lands in one of four quadrants: Do First, Schedule, Delegate, Eliminate. The Eisenhower matrix is a decades-old decision tool, and GSD keeps it that way: one calm surface, one decision at a time. PRIVATE BY DEFAULT Your tasks live on your device. GSD works fully offline, with no account, no sign-up, and nothing sent anywhere. Optional sync is there if you want it — sign in with Apple, Google, or GitHub and your tasks stay in step across iPhone, iPad, and the GSD web app. Your choice, never a requirement. CAPTURE WITHOUT BREAKING STRIDE Type one line. Shorthand does the sorting: • !! marks urgent and important — straight to Do First • ! urgent, * important • #tags organize as you type Share a link or text from any app and it becomes a task. A Home Screen widget keeps today's focus in view. DEPTH UNDER A CALM SURFACE The grid stays simple; the power sits one layer down. • Subtasks, tags, notes, and due dates with reminders • Recurring tasks — daily, weekly, monthly • Dependencies: see what's blocked and what's blocking • Built-in time tracking with estimates and timers • Snooze, archive, and auto-archive to keep the board honest FIND ANYTHING Smart views slice your tasks the way you think — Today's Focus, This Week, Overdue Backlog, Ready to Work — or build your own with filters. A command palette puts every task and screen one tap away (⌘K with a keyboard). PROGRESS, MEASURED HONESTLY A dashboard shows completion trends, quadrant balance, tracked time, and upcoming deadlines. No badges, no manufactured rewards, no pressure to open the app — just an accurate picture of how you're doing. DESIGNED FOR iOS, NOT PORTED Native SwiftUI throughout. Swipe actions, context menus, dark mode, and an iPad layout built for the larger canvas. VoiceOver labels, Dynamic Type, and Reduce Motion respected everywhere. No ads. No tracking. No attention engineering. Capture what matters, decide once, and get back to your day.

Driftnote is for the part of writing that happens before the writing — working out who is in the story, what happens, and whether any of it holds together. You tell it what you're writing: horror, romance, mystery, thriller, fantasy, science fiction, drama, comedy, adventure, or nothing in particular. The app adjusts to the answer. The questions it asks about a character in a horror story are not the ones it asks in a romance. There are five places to put things. The pile is for anything half-formed. No structure, no fields to fill in. Put a #hashtag on something and it becomes a filter you can pull on later. The cast holds characters, places, objects, and whatever is standing in the way. Each one gets a set of fields that suit what you're writing. The timeline is what happens, in the order it happens in the story's world. You can start from an existing structure if the blank page is the problem, or build it a beat at a time. The workbench is how your story works, in sections you name yourself. It suggests things. You can ignore all of them. The draft is a proper writing space — real formatting, version history for every page going back twenty states, and Markdown export when you want your words somewhere else. On privacy. Signed out, which is the default, everything stays on your device and nothing is sent anywhere. The app works with no connection at all. Signing in exists for one reason: having the same desk on more than one device. If you had already written things before signing in, it asks whether to bring them with you rather than quietly replacing them. You can download all of your work as a single file, restore from one, or delete your account and everything in it. All of that is in Settings, and none of it requires emailing anyone. On AI. There isn't any unless you turn it on and supply your own Anthropic API key. Every room, template and export works without it. Nothing you write is used to train anything. Ten themes, light and dark. Free. No subscription, no purchases, no ads, no analytics.