Lunatask

Most to-do apps are museums of good intentions. Tasks get added faster than they get finished, the list swells into a scrolling monument to guilt, and eventually the whole thing gets abandoned for a fresh start somewhere else. Lunatask starts from the premise that this cycle is a design failure, not a personal one.

Developed by Michal Krejčí, Lunatask combines a task manager, habit tracker, mood tracker, journal, Markdown notes, and a personal relationship manager (PRM) in one end-to-end encrypted package. It runs on iOS and Android alongside desktop platforms, and it’s explicitly designed with ADHD users in mind. That last point isn’t a marketing sticker. It shapes the core interaction. Instead of putting everything ever promised in front of the user, Lunatask shows a short list of what to do next.

The market positioning is shrewd. On one side sit the blank-canvas all-in-ones, Notion and its many imitators, which hand over building blocks and expect users to design their own system. On the other sit polished single-purpose tools: a dedicated task manager here, a streak-based habit app there, a separate journaling app somewhere else. Lunatask takes the middle ground. It’s an integrated system with strong opinions built in, but flexible enough that a job and household chores don’t have to follow the same rules.

The privacy angle sharpens the pitch considerably. An app that holds a journal, mood and stress history, and private notes about friends and family holds some of the most sensitive data a person owns. Encrypting it end to end is the correct engineering decision. In a category where many popular tools can read that data on their servers, it’s a real differentiator.

The audience is enthusiastic but small. The US App Store shows 4.4/5 from about 102 ratings. That sample size says something on its own: this is a cult favorite, not a mass-market hit.

Pricing is freemium, with a catch. The free plan is tightly capped, limiting how much of the system a newcomer can actually build out, and the most interesting prioritization tools sit behind the paid tier. The subscription is priced at a premium to most to-do apps, and a lifetime license exists — though not through the mobile app stores.

• The “Next” List: Rather than an ever-growing backlog, Lunatask shows a short, ranked list of what to tackle now. This is the app’s philosophical center of gravity.
• Per-Area Ranking Systems: Each “area of life” can use its own prioritization model: automatic, Must/Should/Want, the Eisenhower Matrix, or a Kanban-style board with work-in-progress limits.
• Time Tools & Calendar Time-Blocking: Tasks support time estimates, timers (including Pomodoro), recurrence, and scheduling. Google, Outlook, and iCloud calendar integration lets tasks be blocked out next to actual meetings.
• Habit & Mood Tracking: Daily and weekly habits with streaks and reminders, plus mood logging that captures emotions, energy, and stress. More than one emotion can be logged per day.
• Encrypted Notes & Journal: Markdown notes with templates and backlinks, plus PIN-protected notebooks for the journal entries nobody wants anyone else seeing.
• Personal Relationship Manager: Reminders to reconnect with friends and family and a timeline of shared memories.
• Integrations: Email-to-task, a browser extension, Zapier, and a public API.

The Death of the Backlog

The short “next” list deserves top billing because it attacks the real bottleneck in personal productivity. That bottleneck isn’t capture or organization. It’s task initiation. Staring at sixty open items produces decision fatigue before anything gets done, and for people with ADHD that paralysis can end the day outright. By narrowing the view to a handful of candidates, Lunatask makes the hardest decision for the user, or at least shrinks it to something manageable.

The tradeoff is trust. The ranking logic has to surface the right things. People who need to see the full inventory at all times will feel the friction, and Lunatask’s weak filtering, a recurring complaint, makes it harder to drop into a broader view when one is needed.

One Life, Many Rulebooks

The sharpest idea here is that different parts of a life deserve different prioritization logic. Nearly every competitor imposes one global model on everything. Lunatask lets a work area run a Kanban board with WIP limits, a constraint borrowed from lean manufacturing that stops eight half-finished things from being juggled at once. Personal errands can use the blunt honesty of Must/Should/Want. A side project can go through the Eisenhower Matrix, where urgency and importance finally get separated.

This is a real insight about how people actually live, and it’s where most of the praise for the app is aimed. The execution has two problems. First, the free plan’s two-area limit means free users barely get to experience the headline feature, and users report that the Eisenhower Matrix sits behind the paywall. Second, the walls between areas become a liability when a unified “today” view is needed: pinned tasks can’t be ranked across areas. Separating areas is the app’s main strength, and the inability to rank across them is its most frustrating structural limit.

Time Is the Real Constraint

A to-do list without time attached is a wish list. Lunatask’s time estimates combined with calendar time-blocking force an uncomfortable but necessary reckoning: once tasks sit next to meetings, overcommitment becomes visible. The built-in Pomodoro timer handles the last mile, the actual act of starting. Together these features close the loop from what needs doing to when it will get done to starting now. Few apps cover all three stages in one place.

Everything Else in a Life

The supporting modules are more than bolt-ons. Allowing multiple emotions per day in the mood tracker is a small detail that shows real thought, because emotional states rarely collapse into a single data point. PIN-protected journals and Markdown notes with backlinks are capable, if not class-leading.

The personal relationship manager sounds like the oddest inclusion and may be the most humane one. ADHD’s “out of sight, out of mind” problem applies to people as much as to tasks, and a gentle nudge to call an old friend is productivity in the deepest sense. The open question for any all-in-one is whether the modules form a coherent system or just six apps sharing a sidebar. At minimum, keeping mood, energy, habits, and tasks under one roof makes it possible to notice patterns that scattered apps would hide.

Capture and Integrations

Capture friction kills productivity systems faster than anything else. Email-to-task, a browser extension, Zapier, and a public API give Lunatask several ways to pull work in from the rest of a digital life. The public API also reassures power users that their data isn’t locked in a walled garden.

Where It Breaks Down

The limitations are clear and consistent across user feedback. There are no task dependencies, little project management, and no team collaboration. Anyone running multi-step projects with sequencing requirements will hit a ceiling quickly. There’s also an irony to swallow: an app built for ADHD users comes with a real learning curve. Six interlocking tools and multiple ranking modes mean significant onboarding friction. The well-regarded documentation softens the problem without eliminating it.

Lunatask’s most important design decision isn’t a color palette or a typeface. It’s subtraction. Showing fewer tasks is a visual choice as much as a functional one, and it fits the app’s stated purpose of reducing cognitive load.

The tension is that the rest of the app works against that restraint. Six tools under one roof mean a large navigation surface, and the learning curve users describe comes partly from that breadth. Lunatask’s challenge is keeping the calm of its task view as users move through habits, moods, journals, notes, and relationships.

On performance, the available user feedback is telling in what it leaves out. Complaints focus on missing features, such as filtering, dependencies, and widgets, rather than crashes, sync failures, or sluggishness. End-to-end encrypted sync is technically harder to get right than conventional cloud sync, so stability not appearing among the common complaints is a quiet point in the app’s favor. The rating pool is small, though, so treat that as encouraging rather than conclusive.

On iOS and Android, Lunatask’s quick-hit modules are in their natural habitat. Logging a mood, checking off a habit, or glancing at the “next” list are exactly the kind of brief interactions phones handle best. A PIN-protected journal also makes more sense on a device that leaves the house.

The bigger, more structural views fare less naturally on a phone by their nature. A Kanban board is a wide-screen concept, and time-blocking a full day against a calendar benefits from desktop real estate. The sensible workflow is to plan on the desktop and execute on mobile.

The clearest mobile weak spot is limited widgets, a common user complaint. For an app whose entire thesis is “here’s what to do next,” a strong home-screen widget would be the most natural surface it could have. Making users open the app to see that list adds friction exactly where Lunatask should be eliminating it.

Calendar support covers both camps sensibly: iCloud for iPhone users and Google for most Android users, with Outlook for anyone whose work life lives in Microsoft’s ecosystem.

Then there’s the purchasing wrinkle. The lifetime license isn’t available through the iOS or Android apps (or the Mac App Store), so mobile-first users have to go to the web to buy it. With only about a hundred iOS ratings on record, there’s not enough platform-specific data to read anything into.

Lunatask understands something most productivity software ignores: the problem usually isn’t a lack of places to store tasks, it’s too many of them in front of the user. Its short “next” list, its per-area ranking systems, and its calendar-aware time tools form a coherent, humane philosophy, and end-to-end encryption shows real respect for the intimate data it asks for.

It’s not a project manager, and it doesn’t pretend to be one. The missing dependencies, weak filtering, and absence of collaboration features are real gaps, and the free tier is too stingy to show off the app’s best idea. We rate it a solid 7 out of 10 in spirit: worth adopting by the right audience, but flawed in ways that matter. If the pitch lands, the free plan is the sensible way to learn the mechanics before committing to a subscription, and the lifetime license only makes sense for someone certain they’ll still be using it years from now. That’s a lot of loyalty to promise any software up front, but for the right user, Lunatask merits the consideration.