Cadence :: Productivity Without the Pressure Blog Updates

Product update Braindump is here — try it free, plus Dropbox sync A few things have landed in Cadence recently. One of them is a proper new feature, and you don't need to upgrade to try it. 🧠 Braindump This is the main event. Instead of adding tasks to your list one at a time, you can now just talk — or type — everything that's on your mind in one go, in whatever order it comes out. Cadence pulls out the individual tasks for you, has a go at guessing priority from how urgently you phrased something, and lets you check everything over before anything actually gets added. It's built for the days where your head's too full to organise itself, let alone organise a to-do list. Everyone gets one free use to see if it's actually useful for how your brain works — after that it's a Pro feature. 📝 Smarter task adding Available to everyone, no trial needed. Type a task like "pick up meds at 3" and Cadence will detect the time and set it automatically — same for dates. Small thing, but it removes a step from the most repetitive part of using the app. If you're on Pro, timed tasks also get a quiet notification 5 minutes before they're due, so you're not relying on remembering to check the app yourself. 🔄 Dropbox sync Cross-device sync now supports Dropbox alongside Google Drive. Pick whichever you already use — everything's encrypted on your device before it's uploaded, so it's unreadable to Dropbox, to Google, and to us. OneDrive is next, currently stuck behind some Microsoft account setup issues that are out of our hands. No ETA we can honestly give you, but it's not abandoned. 📶 More reliable offline editing If you use Cadence somewhere the connection drops in and out, edits made offline now merge properly when you're back online, rather than risking being silently overwritten. Not glamorous, but it matters. Curious about Pro? See what's included — £3.99/month, cancel any time. As always

It's been a busy few weeks of building. Some of this came from feedback, some of it from "this should obviously exist and doesn't yet" — but all of it is live now, so here's a proper rundown. Pain is now a first-class option Energy and focus have always been the two things Cadence asks about when building your day. They were never the whole picture for everyone, though — if you live with chronic pain, "low energy" and "high pain" aren't the same thing, and planning around only one of them misses something important. Pain Level is now a third option alongside Energy and Focus, and you're not limited to picking just one. Your check-in and onboarding now let you select any combination — energy, focus, pain, all three, whichever actually describes your situation. The AI scheduling takes whichever you've selected into account, and pain uses its own colour scale rather than reusing energy's (low pain is good, so it's green — the opposite direction to how energy and focus work, which took some care to get right rather than just inverting a slider). Daily Wisp Motivations and App Tips Two new opt-in notification types, both free, both off by default until you turn them on in your profile settings. Wisp Motivations sends a short message each morning — generated to be relevant to your situation where possible, with a sensible fallback when it isn't. We spent a genuinely unreasonable amount of time making sure these don't read like a wellness poster. No "you've got this," no "be gentle with yourself." Just a short, plain, sometimes dryly funny message that doesn't pretend every day is fine. App Tips are occasional nudges toward features you might not have found — things like the mid-day reschedule or fixed task times. Low frequency, genuinely useful rather than "please open the app more." Mark Complete, right from the notification If a task reminder pops up

A lot of "AI-powered" planning apps amount to a thin wrapper around a chatbot that's been told to "be helpful and encouraging." You ask it to plan your day, and it gives you a list that looks plausible but ignores the fact that your dentist appointment is fixed at 2pm, or schedules four "deep focus" blocks back to back like that's a thing a human can do. Cadence uses Gemini to build your day plan too — but getting it to behave took more work than just writing a friendly prompt. The problem with "just ask nicely" Early versions of the scheduling prompt buried constraints in regular sentences — "please try to keep fixed appointments where they are" mixed in with a dozen other instructions. The model would routinely ignore it. Not maliciously, just... it's a lot of text, and soft instructions get lost in soft instructions. What actually works: shouting (politely) in headers The fix turned out to be structural, not tonal. Breaking the prompt into clearly named, ALL-CAPS sections — FIXED TIME CONSTRAINTS, PRIORITY RULES, TASK NAMES — made an enormous difference to how reliably the model respects them. It's a bit like the difference between mentioning something in passing during a meeting versus putting it on a slide with a heading. Same information, very different chance of it landing. What goes into the plan When Cadence builds your day, it's pulling from several layers: Your profile — energy and focus peak times, whether you need regular breaks (and how long), hard limits you've set, and a free-text "Your situation" field where you can describe what's actually going on: conditions, circumstances, anything the AI should know that doesn't fit in a dropdown. This is passed anonymously to the model when building your plan; it's never stored on the servers. Today's check-in — your energy and/or focus level right now, what time you're available from and until, and whether

Most productivity apps have an implicit target user: someone with consistent energy, reliable focus, and enough capacity to follow a schedule they set the day before. If that's not you, most apps will just make you feel worse about it. Cadence is built for the other days. The slow starts. The mid-afternoon crashes. The days where you have two hours and need to make them count. What makes it different Before you build your day, Cadence asks how your energy and focus are sitting. It then plans around that — pulling from your task list and matching tasks to what you've actually got. If you're operating at low capacity, it'll prioritise accordingly. Mid-day reschedule is built in. If energy drops further, or something takes longer than expected, you can reset your plan from wherever you are without losing what's already been done. No guilt architecture Tasks that don't get done roll over. There are no streaks to protect. No daily score. No app notifications implying you could have done more. Just a plan that works with your energy instead of against it. Pricing Free tier includes AI planning, task rollover, and push notifications. Pro (£3.99/month) adds Google Calendar sync, cross-device sync, and the Ask Cadence AI chat. No card required to start. 👉 Get Cadence today...Continue Reading → You\'re reading A daily planner for low energy days — not just good ones by Cadence, posted on Cadence :: Productivity Without the Pressure.

If you enjoyed reading this, you can follow Cadence on: Facebook