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Welcome to Colonnes
Colonnes is a personal task management app designed for professionals. Its goal is not to replace your shared calendar or your company’s project management tools. Instead, it complements them by sitting at the end of the workflow, helping you with personal organization and task execution.
Colonnes is built for people who need to manage complex tasks or large-scale projects.
It can also be especially helpful for people with ADHD and for anyone looking to combat procrastination, as it allows tasks to be broken down recursively into smaller subtasks.
Learn more about the principles behind this approach:
You can begin with a short tutorial covering the basic actions, or continue reading this page for a broader overview of how Colonnes works.
Colonnes follows a three-step workflow:
1. Organize
To organize your tasks, you can use spaces. You can create one or more spaces and archive them when you no longer need them. Each space contains your projects and tasks.
One of Colonnes’ defining features is that it displays tasks using Miller columns rather than a tree view, similar to Column View in the macOS Finder. This makes better use of the horizontal space available on modern screens.
You can break a project down into smaller tasks, recursively and to any level of detail.
2. Plan
You can open the calendar to plan your tasks. Colonnes uses the same column-based system here. There is no rigid timetable forcing you to carefully schedule the start and end time of every task, a plan that real-life events would probably disrupt anyway.
Simply drag and drop a task to assign it an execution date. The order of tasks in the calendar can be completely different from their order in a space. The only difference between a column in a space and one in the calendar is that a calendar column supports only one level.
3. Execute
Once a group of tasks is ready to be executed, you have several options. You can use Stack, which displays each task one at a time, shows your progress, and offers an optional timer. The timer can use a fixed duration, run until a specific time, or follow the Pomodoro technique.
On your computer, Stack can run in a small window that stays on top of everything else on your desktop.
Alternatively, Remote Stack turns a second device, such as a smartphone or tablet, into a copilot.
As an alternative to Stack, you can print your tasks. You can use a standard printer or a thermal receipt printer to print tasks one at a time.
Selection & Edit Modes
Colonnes also has a very simple and fast task system with two work modes. Edit mode lets you create tasks as if you were typing in a regular text editor. When you need to reorganize them, Selection mode lets you work as you would in a file explorer.
Flexible organization
Colonnes holds more than tasks: use text, separator, or heading items to give context. Add colors, your own tags, and conditional formatting rules to highlight what matters most, or templates to organize your repetitive work.
Fast and private by design
Colonnes is easy to learn for everyone, with drag and drop for every action. But if you want to work as quickly as possible, you can also use it entirely from the keyboard. And there is no need to learn over 100 keyboard shortcuts: a Command Menu covers the actions you do not perform often.
Colonnes is local-first: your documents are stored as files on your computer, keeping the app fast and your data private.