The OnPace Manifesto
Procrastination is discomfort avoidance, not laziness. OnPace exists because every other productivity app treats it as a time management problem. It isn't.
One
You did not fail at Todoist because Todoist lacked features.
You did not fail at Things because Things lacked polish.
You did not fail at TickTick, Notion, Sunsama, or the six apps you tried before them because any of those apps were poorly designed. Most of them are beautiful. Some of them are genuinely great.
You failed at them because they all treat the problem as one of organisation.
The problem is not organisation. The problem is that there is a task you do not want to do, and you will pay almost any cognitive price to avoid feeling the discomfort of facing it. The research has a name for this. Tim Pychyl and Fuschia Sirois call it affect regulation. You are not managing your time badly. You are managing your feelings at the expense of your time.
Time management apps are the wrong tool because they solve the wrong problem.
Two
OnPace has three rules it will not break.
Three tasks a day. Not thirty. Not ten. Three. Three is the number that forces you to choose, and choosing is the work. Adding a fourth task to a daily plan is not more productive. It is a way of deferring the decision about what actually matters. OnPace will not let you.
Close the day. Every day. Every night, OnPace runs a Close Day ritual. You resolve every unfinished task. You choose a carry reason from four options. You receive one score: clean or carried. There is no "skip for today." There is no silent rollover. Silent rollover is how to-do lists acquire eighteen-month-old ghosts. OnPace will not let you.
Three strikes and the task is decided. Carry a task once, it shows up tomorrow with a red tally mark. Carry it twice, the tally doubles. Carry it three times, OnPace forces you to choose: do it now, schedule a specific date, or drop it on the record. No fourth strike. No fifth. The task does not get to live indefinitely in a limbo state. It gets resolved. The resolution might be that you drop it. That is a legitimate outcome. Silent rot is not.
If these rules sound harsh, they are not for you. That is fine. We mean that literally. OnPace is a niche tool for a specific kind of user, and the fastest way to waste your time is to pretend otherwise.
Three
OnPace will not praise you.
We will not send you a "great job" notification when you complete a task. We will not congratulate you on a streak. We will not celebrate your weekly review with confetti. There are five very good reasons for this, and the single best one is that praise from an app is hollow. You know it is hollow. It still feels vaguely nice, which is why it works, which is also why it is a design pattern borrowed directly from casinos.
We are not willing to borrow design patterns from casinos.
What OnPace will do instead is report. The stats tab shows you what happened. The pattern dashboard shows you what you keep doing. The weekly review tells you how many tasks you carried, which category you carried most, and which day of the week you fail on. These are facts. Facts are more useful than praise, and they do not require you to trust an app's emotional instincts.
If you want warmth, there are better apps. We do not think OnPace is better than those apps. We think OnPace is different from them in a way that matters to a small group of users who have been failed by every warm app on the market.
Four
Pro is not more features. Pro is the app becoming self-aware of your avoidance.
The free version of OnPace enforces the rules. It makes you commit to three tasks, makes you close the day, makes you face carry strikes. That is the product. If the free version is all you use, you will get most of the value.
Pro is what happens when OnPace starts watching your last fourteen days and telling you what you can't see yourself. Which category you carry most. Which day of the week is statistically your worst. When your mid-day pace is below the pace that leads to a clean day, based on your actual behaviour profile and not a generic algorithm. Which task, at the moment you commit to it, has a 70% probability of being carried based on your history with that category, that time of day, and that day of the week.
Pro users can ask OnPace a question you cannot ask any other productivity app: why do I keep avoiding this specific thing? The pattern profile is the answer, in facts, in numbers, in behavioural observations, in a compressed fourteen-day summary that gets re-computed every night while you sleep.
Pattern intelligence is the entire Pro value proposition. Everything else Pro offers — encrypted backup, CSV export, advanced stats, AI feedback — is in service of that. The fundamental thing we are selling is self-awareness, rendered in data.
Five
OnPace stores your data locally.
Your tasks, your routines, your history, your carry reasons, your Close Day scores, and your streak all live in an on-device SQLite database. If you never turn on Pro cloud backup, none of that data ever leaves your iPhone. We do not have access to it. We cannot see it. We cannot sell it. We cannot share it. We cannot aggregate it. We cannot hand it over.
If you turn on Pro cloud backup, your database is encrypted on your device before upload using AES-256-GCM with a 32-byte random key that is generated on your iPhone and stored in the iOS Keychain. The key never leaves your phone. The backup in our storage bucket is a blob of ciphertext we cannot decrypt. This is not a marketing claim. It is architecture. We made a deliberate decision to not be able to access your data even if we wanted to.
The cost of this architecture is real. If you lose your iPhone and your Keychain and have no other backup, your Pro cloud backup is irrecoverable. We cannot help you. That is the honest trade. We think it is the right trade, and we wanted you to know about it before you signed up.
Six
The name is a small joke. OnPace. On pace. Pacing yourself. Also: confronting the pace you are actually moving at, instead of the pace you imagine. Pace is neutral. It does not praise or criticise. It reports.
The tagline is confront the gap. The gap is the distance between the person you think you are and the person your last fourteen days of behaviour say you are. OnPace does not close the gap for you. It shows you the gap exists, makes it measurable, and gets out of the way.
If the gap is small, OnPace will quietly confirm it, in the data. If the gap is large, OnPace will tell you, in the data. Either way, we are not here to make you feel a specific way about the number. We are here to put the number in front of you.
The product is the number. The product is the ritual that produces the number. The product is the refusal to let you look away.
Seven
This is what OnPace is. If it's what you want, the App Store link is below. If it isn't, we mean it when we say OnPace is not for you. There are better-tempered apps on every store shelf. Use one of those. We will not be offended.
Confront the gap.