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Brain Dump And A Quick "Get Started" Workflow.
I get a lot of requests through email for work. A lot of them are project-based, and they usually do not arrive as one clean, perfectly organized task. They arrive as a list. Sometimes it is a list of things to do before a meeting. Sometimes it is a set of steps from a colleague. Sometimes it is a “can you also…” message that quietly turns into four separate tasks before I even finish reading it. That is exactly why I added Brain Dump mode to Athena’s mobile workflow. Th
Dave Johnson
4 days ago2 min read


Big News!
About two years ago, I decided to start building something that I honestly figured would never leave my own head. I had this idea for a task and project management app. I wanted something that didn’t require a monthly subscription. I wanted the tools I kept wishing other apps had. And, more than anything, I wanted it to care about more than just getting things done. I wanted it to pay attention to emotional health, overwhelm, follow-through, and the very human side of trying
Dave Johnson
Jun 123 min read


Emotional Health vs Medical App
Athena is built with emotional health in mind - but it is NOT a medical app. I really wanted to spend a little bit of time surfacing what that means. Athena is not a medical app. It does not diagnose anything. It does not treat anything. It does not replace therapy, medication, coaching, professional support, or the advice of someone who knows your actual life better than a piece of software ever could. I say that directly because “emotional health” can get slippery fast, es
Dave Johnson
Jun 32 min read


No Subscription. No Kidding.
Athena is a one-time purchase. It was part of the philosophy from the beginning. I hate renting things. I hate paying monthly for something on the off chance it gets a killer new feature at some point when the base application is usually enough. I do get it. I understand why some developers have gone this route. And after spending the time I spent building Athena, I'm more inclined to keep some of the subscriptions offered by small independent developers like me. They n
Dave Johnson
May 272 min read


Take Back Your Life (Without the Guilt if Your Progress Stalls)
One of the design rules for Athena became very simple: The app should help you notice what matters without making you feel bad for being human. That rule shaped more decisions than I expected. A lot of task and project management software is built around urgency. Red numbers. Badges. Overdue warnings. Increasingly loud reminders. The assumption is that if the software applies enough pressure, you will finally become the version of yourself who never gets behind. I have nev
Dave Johnson
May 22 min read


Introducing Athena
I did not start building Athena because the world needed another task app. That would be a REALLY hard argument to make with a straight face. There are already plenty of task apps. Some of them are excellent. Some of them are beautiful. Some of them are powerful enough that using them starts to feel like you've wandered into a graduate seminar in planning.. But I kept running into the same problem: most productivity tools seem to assume the issue is laziness. Missed a deadli
Dave Johnson
Apr 12 min read
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