Rainbow of Desire

A calendar tells you whether something is scheduled. It does not tell you how much of it is stacked on top of itself. Rainbow of Desire draws your weeks as a grid where the color deepens the more your work overlaps, so you can see the heavy week before you walk into it.

And when the week is heavy, the answer is rarely a longer list. It is having one step small enough to take in the five minutes you actually have.

THE RAINBOW

Press and hold an empty cell for the day something starts, then again for the day it ends, and a line is drawn down the grid. Days you actually work on it are dark. The rest stay pale, because work that is not finished still holds you, even on the days you do not touch it.

Cells across a row are the jobs you are rolling at once that day. When the row fills up, one slip pushes the whole day.

TWO QUESTIONS, AND ONLY TWO

Split a large job into steps. Each step is then sorted by two questions.

Does it start with no warm-up? If you have to reload where you left off, a five-minute gap is spent warming up and nothing else.

Does it run all the way through in five minutes? Work you leave half done follows you into the next hour.

Only a step that answers yes to both is a fragment, something to take when five minutes open up. Everything else is a block, and belongs in time you have set aside. The app answers first, from the words and the time you wrote. You step in only when it is wrong.

Twelve five-minute gaps are not an hour. Fragments of time do not add up into a total, which is exactly why the steps that fit in a gap have to be marked apart from the start.

THE BOLT

Swipe a row to the right to add a Bolt, your own mark saying this one is ready right now. A bolted row jumps the queue and stands at the top, so when a gap opens you look up there instead of reading the whole list.

STEP ORDER, DECIDED ONCE

Steps either wait for each other or they do not, and you decide that once for the group instead of wiring up dependencies one by one. In order stands the first unfinished step. Any order stands whichever fragment you could pick up now.

WIDGETS

Three of them, on the Home and Lock Screen. To-Do shows the job you are on and the step inside it. Bolt lists only what you could pick up in five minutes right now. Rainbow shows the density grid itself.

SHARING

Send an invite link to share your events read-only, or to open one to-do list that you and the people you invite read and write together.

WHAT IS FREE

The heart of the app costs nothing. Writing to-dos, the Rainbow, splitting into steps, the two questions, and step order are all free, with no account and no sign-up.

Rainbow Pro is one purchase, not a subscription, and it opens six extras: using the app alongside the Mac, Home and Lock Screen widgets, importing from Calendar, sharing events, event stats, and the weekly Ledger.

ON THE MAC

Rainbow Workshop is a separate macOS app. On the same iCloud account, to-dos and weekly plans carry across on their own.

PRIVACY

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