A weekly planner around the roles and goals
Stay on course — and keep your head clear.
Free while in early access · No credit card required
Father
More time with the kids
The best summer holidays
By the end of August
The method, and the app that runs it
Four steps, and the fourth one starts the next week. Take all of them or just a couple — each one works on its own, and each one is a page in Motive.
Define your roles
We live several roles at once, and in one flat list the urgent always beats the important — the role that never complains, usually you, gets nothing. Roles make the imbalance visible in March, not in December.
Define your goals
Writing a goal down is already work: most of what people want is never written anywhere, so it never gets a first step or a date. A dream stays a dream for as long as it needs to, and the day you make it a goal Motive asks the three questions that matter — the outcome, the obstacle, and what you do first.
Plan the week
A plan is a promise to a particular day. Today, tomorrow, no date — and missed, which is not there to shame you: it is the only honest signal that the week you planned was not the week you can carry.
Close it with a review
A week you never look back at teaches you nothing. On Sunday the review puts the plan next to what actually happened — what you finished, what you missed — and asks for a few lines about it. Four of those in a row and you stop guessing how much a week of yours holds.
Free while in early access · No credit card required
And what the week needs around it
Four steps are the method. The rest of the app is there for the days the method meets real life.
Projects
Is the task really several steps? Then it is a project. Left as one line it either scatters across the weeks or never starts at all — as a project it holds its own tasks and its own notes, so the reference material sits next to the work.
Pause and postpone
A week holding more than you can carry. So take things out: pause a project and its tasks leave the plan without being lost, postpone a task and it comes back on the day you named.
Notes
Whatever you are trying to remember is attention you are not spending on the work. An idea, a quote, something someone said, the thing to ask the doctor — write it down and it attaches to the role or the project it belongs to, still there when the subject comes back up.
Tags, across all of it
Roles are who you are being; tags are where you are and who you are with — the shop, the summer house, a person you will see on Friday. One word ties together tasks and notes that live on different pages, so opening the tag when you get there is the whole trick.
What early users say
“Defining roles made me realize that keeping up the household — groceries, cooking, repairs — is not the same as nurturing my relationship with my wife. Those are two completely different roles.”
“I put things off — always have. For a couple of weeks I kept dragging the same cards from Missed to Tomorrow, until it was plain that tomorrow could never hold them all. That horrified me, and I did two of the easy ones on the spot — no resistance, and honestly with some pleasure.”
Sergey Building Motive “I spent a while trying to figure out which role to file my whole week's work under — until it hit me that it didn't align with any of my goals at all.”
Fair questions
Is Motive free?
Yes — free while in early access. No credit card, no trial clock, no feature meter.
Will it stay free?
Paid plans will come later. When they do, existing users will get generous notice and early-user terms — no surprise paywalls.
What happens to my data?
It stays yours. You will always be able to take your data with you — a paywall will never stand between you and what you’ve written.
Where does it run?
In the browser, plus an Android APK and a macOS app — same account everywhere.