Daymark

What a daymark is

A daymark is a daytime navigational marker — a fixed shape on the horizon you orient yourself by. Not a route, not a schedule. A thing you can see from where you are.

Designed around how executive function actually fails

Planners built for neurotypical users assume the hard part is deciding what to do. For a lot of people the hard part is somewhere else entirely, and three specific design decisions follow from that.

Time is made visible. Duration is drawn as area, not written as a number. “90 minutes” is an abstraction; a block that is visibly three times another block is a perception. Time blindness is not fixed by better labels.

Capture is cheap. Every step between having a thought and getting it out of your head is a place the thought is lost. Capture is one action, always available, with categorisation deferred — sorting later is easy, remembering later is not.

A broken plan is not a failure state. Nothing turns red and nothing scolds. A motivation intensity dial defaults to gentle — wordless progress dots, nothing numeric — and even at its fullest, a broken run of days is met with “New rhythm starts now” rather than a reset counter. When the day goes sideways the planner helps you re-plan instead of displaying a scoreboard of what you did not do. Guilt is not a productivity mechanism, and shipping one is an active harm in this category.

How it is built

A Tauri 2 app in two halves with a hard trust boundary between them. The Rust core (src-tauri/) owns everything stateful: the bundled SQLite database (rusqlite, compiled in — nothing to install), migrations driven by PRAGMA user_version, .ics calendar fetching, the AI provider seam and the OS keychain. The React 19 + TypeScript frontend owns presentation and nothing durable; every read and write crosses a typed IPC surface of 64 #[tauri::command] functions.

The contract between the halves is a deliberate mirror: the serde structs in models.rs match the interfaces in src/lib/types.ts field for field, so the same object flows Rust → IPC → React with no translation layer. Rich visual states — past-incomplete, running over, active — are derived at render time from status plus the clock, never stored, so there is no stale state to migrate or repair. The timeline itself is plain DOM and CSS, not canvas: blocks are absolutely positioned with height proportional to duration, dragged with keyboard-accessible dnd-kit, and a now-line rides the same time-to-pixels mapping.

Capture is a global hotkey (default CmdOrCtrl+Shift+Space) that raises the window straight into a capture overlay with three modes — text, brain-dump, or a photographed to-do list. AI help is an optional seam, never a hosted service: a local model via Ollama, a small model on an Intel NPU via a Python OpenVINO sidecar the Rust core starts and supervises (output constrained to valid JSON), or your own OpenAI/Anthropic key held in the OS keychain. With none configured the features simply stay off. Calendar integration is a read-only .ics subscription — zero OAuth, and Daymark never writes back to anyone’s calendar.

Yours, actually

Local-first: the plan is a single SQLite file on your machine. No account, no sync, no telemetry; backup and moving devices is a human-readable JSON export you carry yourself. Free, because the people this is built for are badly served by a subscription for a tool that manages their own attention.