Paper planners were right. Apps forgot why.
A weekly planner works because you can see the whole week at once, because writing something down costs a little, and because the page fills up. Every task app removed those constraints and called it progress. kata puts them back — and adds the one thing paper could never do: tell you how you did.
1. The page is the unit of planning.
Open most task apps and you see Today: a list that grows through the day and gets swept into Tomorrow at midnight. You never see the shape of the week. You never notice that Thursday is empty and Tuesday is impossible.
A paper planner shows you seven days in one glance. That glance is where planning actually happens — when you move a task from Tuesday to Thursday because you can see both. kata’s home screen is that page. There is no Today tab because the week already contains today.
2. Structure underneath, time on top.
Paper’s weakness was that a task written on Tuesday belonged only to Tuesday. If it was part of a bigger thing, you kept that in your head. So we gave every task a home — a project, an area, or the Inbox until you decide — and made the week page a view onto that structure. Complete a task on the page and it’s complete in the project. Drag a task up from a pinned project and its next step has a day.
Structure is the database. Time is the view. You never have to choose between a planner and a project manager, because they are the same data drawn twice.
3. A plan is a promise. Keep score.
Productivity apps tend to measure how much you put in: streaks for opening the app, badges for adding tasks. Almost nobody measures the thing that matters — of what you said you’d do this week, how much did you do?
kata’s execution score is that number. It sits under the week’s title, on your widgets, and in Insights next to your streak. Work you finish without planning it is counted separately, so it never pads the number. The score rewards one habit: planning what you’ll actually finish, and finishing it. That is the habit kata exists to build.
4. Quiet, private, yours.
No account. No server of ours. Your week syncs through your own iCloud, and kata never notifies you about anything you didn’t ask for. A planner should feel like a notebook on your desk, not a service that needs you to come back.
kata. Plan like paper. Finish like a pro.