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
You live several roles at once: father, partner, colleague, friend — and yourself. A role is not a folder for tasks, it is a relationship. Write down what matters to you in each one and who you want to be there. That is what the week gets planned from.
Work
- Stable income
- Professional growth
- Work that is mine
Parent
- Be there on the ordinary days
- Teach them to swim
Spouse
- An evening out every week
- Plan the summer together
Me
- Be confident
- Lose weight
Define your goals
Most of what you want is never written down anywhere, so it never gets a first step or a date. Just naming it already works. Working it through works better: the outcome, the obstacle, the first step. Motive asks those three questions the day a dream becomes a goal.
Learn to sing
A family trip to the sea
- Outcome
- The four of us on a beach in August, with nothing to hurry back to.
- Obstacle
- I put the booking off until the tickets are gone.
- Plan
- If I catch myself postponing it, I book that same evening.
$60k a year
Plan the week
A task with a day is a plan; a task without one is a wish. Motive keeps the undated and the missed ones in front of you, and you plan the week by putting them on days — today, tomorrow, Thursday. What you miss shows up in that first list the next morning, not at the end of the month.
Missed
- Call the dentist
- Send the invoice
No date
- Book the tickets
- Plan the anniversary
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.
September
Write it down →
Six of eight done. Both misses were evening ones — I keep planning evenings I do not have.
August
Tickets booked at last. The week got lighter the moment that one was off the list.
All work, nothing for me. Swapping Thursday for the pool next week.
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.
Repeats
Some tasks are not one task — the bins on Tuesday, the class on Thursday. Set the days and the time once and every occurrence stands on its own day: ticking off Thursday does not close Tuesday, and a day that went by is simply gone rather than following you around.
Tracker
Sport three times a week is not a task with a date, it is a count. Give the goal a number and the week keeps the score — three of five done, and what is left is visible on Wednesday rather than on Sunday night.
Dates
Birthdays and anniversaries, and the task each of them needs before it arrives. Say “pick a present, ten days before” once and it comes back every year, ten days ahead — which is the difference between remembering a birthday and being ready for it.
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.”
“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.