1.1 What is Productivities?

Productivities is an offline-first, privacy-first workspace that brings your tasks, notes, web clippings, mindmaps, tables, habits and focus sessions into a single native desktop app. It's designed to replace a handful of subscription tools with one thing you own outright.

The central idea: the apps most people stitch together — a to-do list, a note-taking app, a read-later service, a habit tracker, a focus timer — all benefit from sharing context. A task can reference a note. A note can pin a video. A project (a "Space") can hold all of them. Productivities is a single view over that connected web of objects.

What sets it apart

• Local-first. Your notes are plain markdown files on disk. Your database is a SQLite file you can read with any tool. Nothing is trapped in a proprietary cloud.
• Offline by design. Productivities works with no network connection. Online features — AI, calendar feeds, shared Spaces — are opt-in.
• One-off purchase. No subscription. Free tier covers the essentials; Pro unlocks the advanced features with a single payment.
• Bring your own AI. The app talks to Ollama (running on your own machine), OpenAI, Grok or Gemini — you choose the provider and supply the key.

1.2 Installing the DMG (macOS)

Productivities ships as a standard Mac .dmg disk image. The installation is a drag-and-drop, same as any other Mac app.

Requirements

• macOS 12 Monterey or newer.
• Apple Silicon (M1 or later). A separate Intel build is planned but not yet available.
• ~250 MB of disk space for the app itself; more for your notes and media.

Install

1. Download Productivities.dmg from the pricing page.
2. Double-click the DMG to mount it.
3. Drag the Productivities icon into your Applications folder.
4. Eject the disk image and launch the app from Applications or Spotlight.

First-launch security prompt

Because Productivities is distributed outside the Mac App Store, macOS will warn you the first time you open it. That's expected. If you see "macOS cannot verify the developer":

1. Open System Settings → Privacy & Security.
2. Scroll to the bottom and click Open Anyway next to the message about Productivities.
3. Confirm in the dialog that appears.

You'll only see this once. Subsequent launches behave normally.

Uninstalling

Drag Productivities.app from Applications to the Trash. Your data stays behind at ~/Library/Application Support/Productivities/ — delete that folder too if you want a clean removal.

1.3 First run

The very first time you launch Productivities, it runs a short setup wizard — three steps, no skippable fluff. You'll be in the main app inside a minute.

Step 1 — Account

Pick a username and password. This is the login for the app itself. On a personal Mac with a single user you'll rarely see the login screen, but the credentials are needed for session-based access and so shared Spaces (later, if you use the Group tier) can identify you.

Step 2 — Files location

Productivities asks where to store your notes and media. You can either:

• Accept the default location — a Productivities folder in your home directory with sensible subfolders for notes, images, PDFs, videos and audio.
• Choose an existing folder — useful if you already keep markdown notes somewhere, want them on a synced drive (iCloud, Dropbox), or prefer a custom layout.

You can change this later at any time from Settings → Files.

Step 3 — Welcome

A brief overview of what's included on the Free plan and a pointer to the Pro features you can upgrade to later. Click Finish and you land in the main app.

Where things end up on disk

• Database — ~/Library/Application Support/Productivities/productivities.db
• Notes & media — the folder you picked in Step 2
• Backups — automatic nightly snapshots in ~/Library/Application Support/Productivities/backups/
• Logs — ~/Library/Application Support/Productivities/logs/ (only populated when something goes wrong)

If the wizard is interrupted partway through, Productivities will resume from whichever step you last completed the next time you open the app.

1.4 Tour of the interface

The main window has three zones: a sidebar on the left with every view, a workspace in the middle that changes to match the selected view, and a panel column on the right for the calendar, the AI chat, and routines.

Sidebar views

Each sidebar entry switches the workspace to a different view. From top to bottom:

Planner

Kanban board with day columns (yesterday, today, tomorrow, next week) plus any custom columns you've saved. Your daily home base.

Tasks

Flat list of every task. Powerful filters, grouping and sorting.

Spaces

Manage Spaces — create, edit, delete, and see everything inside each one.

Notes

Markdown editor with live preview, folder tree and tabs.

Pinboard

Gallery of your pinned web content — articles, PDFs, videos, quotes.

Canvas Pro

Free-form visual mindmaps and diagrams.

Tables Pro

Structured data grids with typed columns.

Week Calendar

A seven-day calendar view with tasks and events overlaid.

Productivity Insights Pro

Dashboards for throughput, focus time, task turnaround and workload.

Rules Pro

Automations — triggers, conditions and actions that fire in the background.

Top bar

Above the workspace sits a thin row of tools that follow you across every view:

• Focus Mode button — enters the distraction-free layout (see Chapter 6).
• Calendar panel toggle — slides a day/week calendar in and out of the right column.
• AI Chat toggle — opens the AI assistant panel (Pro, or Ollama-local).
• Routines toggle — the habit-tracking strip.
• Command bar — Cmd+K from anywhere.
• Global search — Cmd+Shift+F searches across every object type.
• Settings — gear icon, bottom of the sidebar.

The command bar

The command bar is your fastest way to do anything. Press Cmd+K and start typing — it fuzzy-matches against every command, every view, and recent objects. Hit return to run.

A shortlist of commonly-used commands to try first: New task, New note, Open Planner, Start focus session, Go to [space name].

Right-click is a first-class citizen

Almost every object — tasks, notes, pins, Spaces, calendar events, table rows, canvas nodes — has a context menu with its most common actions. If you can't find how to do something, right-click the thing you want to act on.

1.5 Free vs Pro tiers

Productivities is one-off purchase software — no subscriptions, no trials that convert, no feature rationing. Buy once, own forever, free updates included. There are three tiers:

Free — everything you need to get started

• Tasks & the Kanban Planner (unlimited)
• Notes (unlimited)
• Pinboard (unlimited)
• Routines / habit tracking
• Spaces
• Calendar panel and Week Calendar
• The AI assistant if you run Ollama locally

No limits, no watermarks, no catches. The Free tier is a legitimate long-term home for anyone who doesn't need the Pro workflow features.

Group — sharing & multi-user

Everything in Free, plus:

• Shared Spaces — work on the same tasks, notes and pins as other users on the same server
• User groups and per-feature permissions
• Up to 30 users

Useful for families, couples managing a household, and small organisations.

Pro — the complete second brain

Everything in Group, plus:

• Canvas — free-form mindmaps and diagrams
• Tables — structured data with computed columns
• Systems — goal-oriented routines
• Smart Pins — AI-enriched web clippings (article summaries, recipe parsing, book synopses)
• Highlighting — extract passages from notes into a searchable library
• Focus Mode with app blocking and focus music
• Time tracking on tasks with workload tracking
• Productivity Insights dashboards and Productivity Smarts
• Custom Kanban columns and custom task statuses per Space
• Apple Reminders & Calendar two-way sync
• AI assistant with cloud providers (OpenAI, Grok, Gemini) if you'd rather not run Ollama locally

Current pricing and a side-by-side comparison are on the pricing page. Throughout these docs, Pro-only features are tagged with a Pro pill so you can see at a glance what's gated.

2.1 Spaces — the unifying container

A Space is the way Productivities groups related work together. Think of it as a project, a context, or a life area — "Home Renovation", "Work", "Books I'm Reading", "Side Project X". Unlike a folder, a Space isn't bound to a single object type: anything can live in a Space — tasks, notes, pins, canvases, tables and routines can all share the same Space.

Spaces are entirely optional. You can use Productivities as a flat workspace with no Spaces at all, assign items to a Space later, or reorganise as your life changes. Items without a Space still show up everywhere — they're just uncategorised.

Properties of a Space

• Name — how it appears in menus and sidebars.
• Colour — tints the icon wherever the Space is shown.
• Icon — a glyph that makes the Space recognisable at a glance.
• Description — a short note for yourself about what belongs here.
• Protected — require a lock password before the Space's contents are visible. Good for sensitive projects.
• Shared — expose the Space to a user group so other people on the same server can collaborate. Group

Using Spaces day to day

• Right-click any Space in the Spaces view for a quick-create menu — Add → Task / Table / Canvas / Note pre-assigns the new item to that Space.
• Most filters (Planner, Task list, Notes, Pinboard) accept a Space filter so you can narrow the view to a single context.
• Set a Default Space in Settings → Tasks so new tasks created via the quick-add bar land somewhere sensible instead of uncategorised.
• Deleting a Space doesn't delete its contents — tasks, notes and pins become unassigned. You won't lose any data.

2.2 The object types

Productivities is built around five primary object types, plus a couple of specialised ones. Each has its own view and its own verbs, but they all share Spaces, tags, scheduling and the rules engine.

Tasks

To-dos with a status, priority, size, scheduled date, due date, assignee, subtasks, dependencies and recurrence. The bread and butter of the Planner and the Task list views.

Notes

Markdown files on disk. Your notes folder is your folder — we read and write plain .md files, but the directory structure belongs to you. Supports live-preview or source editing, wikilinks, embeds, tags, backlinks and frontmatter.

Pins

Web clippings. Paste a URL and Productivities classifies and enriches it — a YouTube link becomes a video card, an IMDB URL becomes a movie, a book page becomes a book, a PDF downloads locally and opens in a built-in viewer. Freeform text and quotes live here too.

Canvases Pro

Free-form visual surfaces for mindmaps, flowcharts, and loose thinking. Nodes can link to other Productivities objects — drop a task onto a canvas and it stays in sync.

Tables Pro

Structured data with user-defined columns. Good for reading logs, gear inventories, holiday planners — anything that wants rows and typed fields without spinning up a spreadsheet app.

Two more object types sit slightly outside this core, each in their own panel:

• Routines — daily or weekly habit tracking with streaks and history.
• Systems Pro — longer-running, outcome-oriented practices built from routines and rules.

2.3 Smart Spaces — filter-driven, auto-populated

A regular Space holds whatever you assign to it. A Smart Space holds whatever matches a filter — and updates itself as you create and tag new content. Nothing is "in" a Smart Space the way items are "in" a regular one; they surface there because they meet the rules.

Filter criteria

• Keywords — words that must appear in an item's title or description.
• Tags — hashtags on notes and pins.
• Pin Types — restrict to articles, books, PDFs, recipes, movies, and so on.

Match ALL vs Match ANY

• Match ALL (AND) — an item must meet every filter to appear. Narrower.
• Match ANY (OR) — an item appearing in any filter shows up. Broader.

Typical uses:

• "Everything tagged #parenting" — one tag filter, Match ANY.
• "All the books I've pinned about design" — pin type book + keyword design, Match ALL.
• "My reading list across media" — pin types book, article, recipe, Match ANY.

Because a Smart Space is defined by its rules, you never need to tidy it. Add a new pin with a matching tag and it appears automatically. Change the rules and the membership updates.

2.4 Custom task statuses and workflows Pro

Out of the box, tasks move between three canonical statuses: Open, In Progress and Completed. That's enough for most personal work — but software projects, publishing pipelines and multi-step workflows often want more.

Pro users can define custom statuses per Space, so tasks in your "Software" Space might flow through Backlog → In Progress → In Review → Released, while your "Writing" Space flows through Idea → Draft → Editing → Published.

Anatomy of a custom status

• Name — e.g. "In Review".
• Colour — a swatch used in dropdowns and kanban columns.
• Type — each custom status maps to one of the canonical types (open, in_progress, completed) so standard filters and metrics still work.
• Position — where it sits in the workflow order, drag-to-reorder.

Enforcement modes

You choose how strictly the workflow is policed:

• Flexible — any status can move to any other. Transitions you configure are guidance only; the UI shows them but won't block you.
• Strict — only the transitions you explicitly allow are permitted. Good for team workflows where "you can't ship without review" is a hard rule.

What happens if you delete a custom status?

Tasks currently using that status aren't deleted — they revert to the canonical type the custom status mapped to. So a task with In Review (mapped to in_progress) becomes a normal "In Progress" task. The Spaces view warns you before deleting and tells you exactly how many tasks are affected.

2.5 Local-first — your files are yours

This is the idea that drives everything else. Your data lives on your machine, in formats you can read, in locations you can reach with Finder. Productivities is a view onto those files; it's not a cloud service that happens to have a desktop client.

Where your data lives

• Database — SQLite at ~/Library/Application Support/Productivities/productivities.db. Holds tasks, pins, spaces, settings and session info.
• Notes folder — a directory of your choosing (Settings → Files). Plain markdown. One file per note. Rename or reorganise freely — Productivities picks up the change.
• Media folders — separate locations for images, PDFs, videos and audio. Referenced from notes with ![[filename]] syntax.
• Backups — nightly snapshots in your user data directory, configurable retention.

What this buys you

• Work offline. Everything except deliberately online features (AI providers, iCalendar feeds, shared-user syncing) works with no network at all.
• No vendor lock-in. If Productivities disappeared tomorrow, your notes are still plain markdown files you can open in any editor, and your SQLite database is a standard format you can query directly.
• Bring your own backup. Time Machine, Arq, rsync, git — whatever you already use for your Mac works for Productivities.
• Private by default. Nothing leaves your device unless you configure an integration that requires it. We don't phone home.

Chapter 10 (Security, Privacy & Your Data) goes deeper into what the app does with the network, what's encrypted, and how to lock things down.