An executive-function operating system that grew out of one specific need: an ADHD brain that needed something to decide what happens next. It still decides what you do next, defends the time you give it, and makes coming back after a lapse effortless.
Most productivity software assumes the hard part is knowing what to do. For an ADHD brain the hard part is starting, and every extra decision between you and the work makes starting less likely.
Navis is built the other way around. It holds the whole plan so you do not have to, shows you one thing at a time, and pays you the moment you begin rather than when you finish. When a day goes badly it moves the work and says nothing. When you come back it pays you more than usual, because coming back is the behaviour worth reinforcing.
It runs in your browser, installs to your home screen, and syncs across every device you sign in on. It is free while it is in beta.
Every feature in Navis is downstream of these. Where a rule and a feature disagree, the rule wins.
Coins arrive the second you press it, before any work happens. An ADHD brain discounts future rewards steeply, so paying out at the end of a two hour task pays almost nothing at the moment you actually need it.
No withering avatar, no lost progress, no red badges. One missed day is where most people quit an app for good, so a missed day costs you nothing at all.
Restart after a lapse and the reward is larger than a normal start. Returning is what predicts whether any of this works, so it is the thing reinforced hardest.
One task on screen, picked from priority, deadline, time of day and what your classes were. A wall of options is a wall you do not get past.
No energy sliders, no mood check-ins, no daily questionnaire. Everything Navis adapts to is read from what you actually did.
Navis writes plans, moves work and warns you. It never locks you out of anything, never blocks a decision, and never scolds. Deciding not to do something is a decision it respects.
Pausing, abandoning and finishing early are all normal. Whatever minutes you did are banked immediately, and nothing you have earned can be taken back.
Starting is the bottleneck. So starting is what pays.
Everything else in this document follows from that one sentence.
The home screen shows a single task, why it was chosen, how long it needs, and one large button. That is the whole interface most of the time.
One tap. Coins and experience land immediately, with a larger payout if you are returning after a gap. Your Focus mode and app blocker switch on a moment later, so the reward is never delayed behind machinery.
A wall clock timer, so it keeps counting while Navis is in the background or your phone is locked. Twenty five, fifty or ninety minutes. A ring for the session and a second ring for the whole day.
If time runs out while you are elsewhere it counts into overtime rather than ending behind your back. Finishing asks whether you are actually done, then needs a deliberate hold, because the urge to quit passes in less time than that.
Tell Navis you want six hours on something and it sets a day target rather than a vague pile of sessions. Press Start once and it chains: session, short break, session, and a longer break every two hours, until the hours are in. The bar shows what is banked and what is left. Stopping at four hours is four hours earned, not a failure.
When a stretch ends Navis asks whether you want the break now or would rather carry on. Carrying on does not cancel it: the break stays owed and a button sits on screen for as long as you want it, so you can take it when your focus actually drops rather than when a timer said so. If a session has run past its target with no pauses, Navis treats that as flow and does not interrupt at all.
Not to judge and never to block. One beat of thought between the impulse and the act, four options, no wrong answer, and carrying on is the larger button. Leaving costs nothing and the minutes are already banked.
Type or speak it in plain words. "I have a Control Systems exam on the 28th." "Gym tomorrow at five." "I'm overwhelmed, make this week lighter."
Navis counts the days you actually have, puts real hours on each one, splits them into sessions, and drops them into the right days. It can also change what already exists: moving work, shrinking it, re-prioritising it, or dropping it entirely. Telling it you are overwhelmed is a real instruction, and it is told that removing work is a valid answer and often the right one.
A blank box is its own kind of friction. Above the input are the situations people are actually in: plan my semester, plan exam revision, I have fallen behind, I am burnt out, just plan my week. Tapping one writes the opening line for you, including the awkward part.
Say what you want to be true. Pass Engineering Mathematics. Ship the MVP. Read twenty books. Navis breaks it into milestones you tick off, works out how many hours a week it genuinely needs, and puts the first sessions in your queue.
Above your goals sits a capacity bar, and it is the part that matters. Most planners answer how to fit everything in. This one answers what you can sustain, measured from hours you have actually logged rather than hours your calendar theoretically contains, and it says out loud when you have committed to more than that.
A plan you will follow beats a plan that looks right.
Navis is instructed to tell you when something has to give, rather than quietly producing a schedule that cannot be done.
A timetable in Navis is not a calendar feature. It is the frame the planner works around.
Enter your classes, shifts, or anything that repeats and is not up for negotiation, either by hand or by telling the planner. Navis subtracts that time from what a day can hold, so a Tuesday with five hours of lectures stops being treated like a free Saturday, and it never schedules work on top of them.
Three optional dates: term, exams, and a break. With them set, Navis expects noticeably more of you during exams and much less during a break, instead of treating every week the same. A break that quietly fills with work is not a break.
When a class has finished and Navis does not know what happened, it asks once: I went, I missed it, or it was cancelled. Nothing is scored. Saying you missed one adds a catch-up session and changes nothing else.
Navis tracks which subjects ran today, which you keep missing, and how long since you last studied each. Reviewing a subject the day it ran is worth far more than reviewing one at random, so that is what it suggests, and it says why.
Miss a day and the remaining hours spread across the days you have left, instead of piling onto today and quietly becoming impossible. Capacity is worked out per day, so a light Saturday absorbs more than a Tuesday full of lectures. Appointments and recurring commitments are never moved.
When the work no longer fits the days remaining, you get the shortfall in hours while you can still act on it. On the Plan tab a readiness ring shows hours done against hours owed before your nearest deadline, and turns amber then red as the maths stops working. It never quietly drops anything.
Navis works out how hard a task is to begin from what it can see: how often you have moved it, how long it has sat there, how big it is, and whether the name is a next action or just a subject. "Study" scores worse than "Email Ulrich about the lab slot". Move something four times and it stops nudging and asks instead, offering to break it up, cut it to fifteen minutes, or drop it.
It is nearly always too big or too vaguely worded to open. Navis says that in as many words, and the only response it offers is to make the thing smaller. Nothing here is ever framed as discipline.
Starting a session switches on your Focus mode and your app blocker together, and stands both back down the moment you pause or finish.
On iPhone and iPad this runs through two Shortcuts and Opal, set up once. The session timer appears in the Dynamic Island, so it stays visible even when Navis is not. Minimise the app, play music, watch something: the clock is wall based and keeps counting.
If a session has run past its target with no pauses, Navis reads that as flow and gets out of the way. No dialog, no countdown, just a quiet line saying the break is there when you want it.
ADHD makes you underestimate your own past as reliably as your future. Navis keeps a permanent record to argue with that, and none of it can go down.
Coins are earned on starting and spent in a small shop of themes, titles and things for your room. Every fortnight the economy shifts: sometimes long sessions pay more, sometimes starting does, sometimes coming back pays double. Nothing you own can ever be lost.
Every focused minute raises the subject it belongs to. Study, Fitness, Work, Reading. They rise slowly and never fall, so a fortnight away leaves them exactly where you left them.
A desk, a lamp, a window, eventually a cat. It grows with your focused hours and never deteriorates, however long you are away.
Every session logged, permanently. The number Navis shows first is how many times you came back after stopping, because that is the one that predicts whether this works.
Not how many hours are free, which is a calendar question, but how much your head has to carry: work committed against what today can hold, how many different areas it is spread across, and how close the nearest deadline is. Four subjects in one day costs more than four hours of one subject. Past eighty five it stops calling the day full and says plainly that something is not happening, because choosing what to drop beats finding out at midnight.
Three scores out of a hundred, written from your real numbers, with the two or three levers that would move them most. Recovery scores high for comebacks. The scoring is explicitly forbidden from scolding, and a low number is described as headroom rather than a failure.
After eight, on a day you actually did something, Navis asks one line: what moved forward. Never on an empty day, never twice, always skippable. It asks about movement rather than how you feel, because that is answerable on a bad day.
Hours, days you showed up, what you finished, how many times you came back, where the time went, what keeps sliding, what is coming, and anything you wrote in the evenings quoted back. This matters because ADHD makes the last bad hour feel like the whole week.
In the last few days before a deadline Navis goes quiet: extras step aside so there is one thing on screen. On an overloaded day it does the same. On a quiet week it does the opposite and suggests setting a goal. It always says which mode it is in rather than silently rearranging itself.
| Device | What you can do |
|---|---|
| iPhone | Everything, including focus, app blocking and notifications |
| iPad | Everything. Can join a session already running on your phone |
| Mac | Everything. A browser extension holds your chosen sites shut |
| Windows | The same extension, the same list, the same account |
| Android | Everything. The app blocks your chosen apps and sets Do Not Disturb itself |
Start on your iPhone and your iPad offers to lock itself too, on the same clock and the same task. Your laptop shows what is running and which device to stop it from. Each device unlocks only itself, and finishing on the device that started it ends the session everywhere and banks it once.
Almost everything Navis records only grows, so most apparent conflicts are not conflicts: totals take the higher number and owned things take the union. Only genuinely editable state falls back to newest wins. If another device is mid-edit you are told, changes still save, and you can take over with one tap.
Two, both deliberate. One when a session hits its target while the app is closed. One a day, at an hour you choose, written from what you actually have on rather than a canned string. It is blunt about the work and never about you, and it is explicitly forbidden from mentioning failing, falling behind, guilt or streaks.
It is not a treatment. The evidence base for ADHD is medication, behavioural therapy and environmental scaffolding. Navis is the scaffolding layer, one part of a stack, and it works best alongside the rest rather than instead of it.
It does not replace your executive function. It carries load. That distinction matters, because promising to replace something turns every shortfall into evidence against you, which is exactly the loop this exists to break.
The planner is a language model. It is useful and it is sometimes wrong. Check anything that matters. Navis will not sit an exam for you.
Some days it will not work. That is designed for rather than papered over. The entire failure model exists because bad days are the normal case, and an app that punishes them is an app you will delete.
And it watches the other direction too. Past roughly eight hours of focus in a day it stops congratulating and says so. A system that only ever encourages more is missing half of what it should do.
Navis is built and run by one person. If something is wrong, or you want a request the app cannot handle itself, write to amaan.nizam@study.thws.de.
Anything about your own data, including a copy of everything held or deleting the account entirely, is built into Settings and does not need an email.
That is the entire idea. Navis picks it, you press Start, and it pays you for that alone. One destination. One next step.
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