ADHD Superpower · for iPhone

You're not lazy. You're running software written for somebody else's brain.

ADHD Superpower is a focus and task app built around one uncomfortable finding: the thing standing between you and your life isn't discipline — it's starting. So this is the first app that rewards you for starting, and refuses to punish you for stopping.

Just start — free See how it works

Free forever, no account Works with no signal Your data stays on your phone

The Threads board in ADHD Superpower, showing five active projects with a large Just start button at the top.

Why the last five apps failed

It was never that you didn't want it badly enough.

You've done this before. You found a beautiful app. You spent a happy Sunday setting it up — projects, tags, colours, a system that would finally hold. For nine days it was perfect.

Then you missed a day. The streak counter went back to zero. And the app that was supposed to help you turned into a small daily accusation on your home screen — so you moved it to the third page, and then you deleted it, and the whole thing became one more piece of evidence in a case you've been building against yourself since school.

Here's what nobody tells you: the app was badly designed, and you were the one who paid for it. Almost every productivity tool on the App Store is built on assumptions that quietly do not hold for an ADHD brain.

Streaks

They assume consistency is the goal. For you the streak isn't motivation — it's a fuse. One bad day and the number that was carrying you becomes the reason you never open it again.

The infinite list

They assume the hard part is remembering. It isn't. You remember everything, constantly, at 3am. The hard part is beginning, and a list of 84 items makes beginning harder, not easier.

Red for overdue

They assume urgency helps. An alarm you can't switch off doesn't create urgency — it creates avoidance, and then you stop opening the app that's shouting at you.

Finishing as the only win

They only score completion. So the twenty minutes you fought for and the three false starts before it — the genuinely hard part — register as nothing at all.

The mechanism

Momentum, not streaks.

This is the whole idea, and every other decision in the app falls out of it. Momentum is a rolling average, not a chain. A good day lifts it. A bad day dents it. Nothing here can be broken — which means there is never a moment where quitting becomes the rational move.

I didn't arrive at this from a design blog. I built it while sitting on the other side of a very specific problem: I have ADHD, I'd failed out of every system I'd tried, and I started taking the question into my own therapy sessions — what actually changes behaviour, and what only looks like it does?

The answer kept coming back to the same place. In the behavioural literature the bottleneck for ADHD isn't motivation, memory or willpower. It's task initiation — the cost of getting from nothing to moving. Reward systems that punish lapses raise that cost every single time you lapse. Which is exactly backwards.

So the scoring was rebuilt around it. Starting a block is worth 12 points. Finishing a whole project is worth 10. That is not a bug — three sessions started with nothing finished scores a 35, because starting is the behaviour being reinforced.

Distractions contribute zero — never negative. Momentum.swift, line 9

Rule 01

Logging a distraction can never cost you points.

The instant an honest self-report lowers a number, people stop reporting honestly and the data becomes worthless. So the Distracted button is free to press — it just quietly hands you your time back.

Rule 02

Absence and failure must not look the same.

A day you didn't use the app is drawn as a gap in the line, never as a zero. Look at the trend chart below — those breaks are days life happened. The app declines to render them as a verdict on you.

Rule 03

The lowest state is called "Resting".

Not Inactive. Not Low. Not a red zone. This is the difference between a dashboard you can open on a bad week and one you avoid for a month — and avoiding it for a month is how this always ended before.

Rule 04

Blocked is muted clay, not red.

Blocked is the status you can act on least. Making it the loudest colour on screen just produces an alarm you can't switch off, on the one item you're least able to fix.

Rule 05

Five active projects. Then it says something.

Over the cap you get a calm inline note — never a block, never a warning triangle. The board still takes the sixth. It's your life; it just tells you the truth about it.

None of this is a new idea

People worked this out a century ago. Software just stopped listening.

Every principle this app is built on was described long before the App Store existed — by psychologists, by a Nobel laureate, by the researcher who has spent forty years studying ADHD. The failure was never in the science. It was in what got built on top of it.

1890

"The faculty of voluntarily bringing back a wandering attention, over and over again, is the very root of judgment, character, and will."

William James · The Principles of Psychology

So we built The Distracted button. Attention wanders — that's not the failure, that's the job. Pressing it costs you nothing and quietly hands your time back, because James was describing bringing it back as the skill. Every app since has penalised you for the one behaviour worth practising.

1971

"A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention."

Herbert A. Simon · Nobel laureate in economics

So we built A board that holds five active projects and then says something. Not a warning, not a block — a calm note. Your 84-item list isn't a plan, it's a tax on the one resource you're short of.

1997

"ADHD is not a disorder of knowing what to do. It is a disorder of doing what you know."

Dr Russell A. Barkley · ADHD and the Nature of Self-Control

So we built One button that decides for you. Barkley's finding is that the gap is performance, not knowledge — so no amount of better planning closes it. Starting a block scores 12 points; finishing a whole project scores 10. The scoring is upside down on purpose, because the doing is the hard part.

1989

"How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives."

Annie Dillard · The Writing Life

So we built The dashboard. Not a score to chase — a record of days, kept somewhere you can bear to look at it. Three months of an honest line is a different kind of evidence than a streak counter, and it's the only one that survives a bad week.

What you actually do with it

One button. It's the whole product.

The biggest button on the screen says Just start. You don't have to pick a project. You don't have to plan your day. You don't have to be ready. You press it, and the app chooses the next unchecked step for you and starts a 25-minute block.

That's the design answering the research directly: the gap between you and the work is the decision, so the app makes the decision.

While the block runs, a live ring sits on your Lock Screen and in the Dynamic Island. If you wander into another app for more than a moment, Focus Guard notices and gently brings you back — no shame, no penalty, no points lost.

A focus block running in ADHD Superpower — a glowing ember ring showing 24 minutes 28 seconds remaining, labelled Underway, with Pause and Distracted buttons.

25/5 blocks, manual advance

The timer never yanks you out of flow. When a block ends it waits for you, because being interrupted mid-thought is expensive and you don't get that thread back.

The daily page

One field for what you're doing right now. Todos, blockers, and a Wins list that writes itself as you finish things — so a day you thought was wasted has receipts.

Park it, stop circling

A thought arrives mid-block. Park drops it somewhere safe in one tap, so it stops looping without becoming another commitment you'll feel bad about.

Home-screen widget

Your next step, on the screen you already unlock ninety times a day. Tick it off without opening anything — the fewer doors between you and the work, the better.

Sit for ten minutes

A quiet timer with a singing bowl, and no lecture attached. It's there on the days when the answer isn't more effort.

Celebrations you feel

Finishing something gives you a real haptic hit and a sound. Small, physical, immediate — the kind of reward an ADHD brain actually registers.

The daily page in ADHD Superpower with a Now field, today's to-dos, a completed item struck through, and one open blocker.

Everything is local first. Every tap writes to your phone immediately — on a plane, in a basement, on the subway. There is no spinner between you and your own to-do list, because a focus app that stalls on a bad connection is a focus app you stop trusting.

You can use the entire thing without ever making an account. Most people never do.

Where the real progress lives

This is the screen you'll open on the bad days.

The dashboard is the point of the whole app. Not because it gamifies anything — because it is the first honest record you'll have of a life slowly coming back.

Look at the trend line. It climbs. It has gaps in it — three weeks where things fell apart — and it still climbs, because momentum dents instead of resetting. That shape is not available to you in an app built on streaks. In a streak app, this same three months would read as four separate failures.

Then there's the line underneath: "Active on 13 of the last 14 days." Not a streak. A count. It cannot be broken — only slowly changed. And the insight above it — the app noticing that you start most often between 5 and 7am — is the kind of thing about yourself you can only learn from data you were never punished for producing.

This is what you're actually buying: evidence, in your own handwriting, that you are not the person you've been told you are.

The momentum dashboard in ADHD Superpower showing a score of 52 in the Rolling band, a rising trend line with gaps for inactive days, and stats for focus time and blocks started.
5Momentum bands
0Streaks to break
0Points lost, ever
100%Usable offline

What the next ninety days can look like

Day 1

You press Just start without deciding anything. Twenty-five minutes later something exists that didn't before. The app says Warming up.

Week 2

You have a bad Tuesday. You open the app on Wednesday anyway — because there's nothing waiting there to punish you. That single behaviour is the one every other app failed to produce.

Week 6

The thing you've been carrying for two years — the portfolio, the chapter, the tax return — is finished. Not through a heroic week. Through forty unremarkable blocks nobody watched you do.

Day 90

You open the dashboard and see three months of a line going up. And you stop describing yourself as someone who's bad at this — because you're holding the evidence that you aren't.

On the Mac too

The same five threads, on whichever screen you're in front of.

Look closely: the portfolio redesign, chapter three, the sync backend, the tax return waiting on Marta, the bassline that's blocked on a cable. The same records, in the same order, on both machines. That's not a mockup — it's what syncing actually looks like.

ADHD Superpower on macOS — the Threads board showing the same five projects as the iPhone, with a date rail down the left and a Just start button.
The same Threads board on iPhone, showing identical projects.

Same account · same records · written locally on both

The desktop app is where the deep work happens — a full week in the date rail, the whole board at once, keyboard-first. The phone is where life actually interrupts you. Neither one is the companion to the other. They hold the same records and both write to disk first.

Which is also the honest reason there's something to pay for. Everything you've seen so far runs on your device and costs me nothing. Keeping two machines in agreement means a server, a database and backups that run whether you're using them or not — so that, and only that, is what the subscription buys.

The momentum dashboard on macOS — a 56 Rolling ring, a trend line with gaps for inactive days, and a histogram of when you typically start.

Pricing

The app is free. Forever. Genuinely.

Everything you've read about above — the board, the timer, the daily page, the dashboard, the widget — works with no account and no payment, for as long as you own the phone. You pay only if you want it on more than one device.

What people usually pay to work on this:

An ADHD coach$200–400 / month
A therapy session$150–250 / hour
The other focus apps$60–80 / year
ADHD Superpower, everything$24.99 / year

Free

$0 / forever

The complete app on one device. Not a trial, not a crippled tier.

  • Threads, timer, daily page
  • The full momentum dashboard
  • Widgets and Live Activities
  • No account required
Best value

Sync · yearly

$24.99 / year

Everything, everywhere. Works out at $2.08 a month — about one coffee a quarter.

  • iPhone, iPad and Mac in sync
  • Encrypted backup of your history
  • New phone, nothing lost
  • 7 days free, cancel in two taps
Start the free week

Sync · monthly

$3.99 / month

Same thing, month to month, if you'd rather not commit to a year of anything.

  • Everything in yearly
  • Cancel any time

Lifetime

$59.99 / once

Pay once. Never think about it again. For people who hate subscriptions on principle.

  • Sync forever, one payment
  • All future updates

Questions people actually ask

The honest answers.

Why don't normal productivity apps work for ADHD?

Because most of them are built for a brain whose bottleneck is memory or planning. For an ADHD brain the bottleneck is usually task initiation — the cost of getting started at all. A longer list and a louder reminder don't lower that cost; they raise it.

Worse, streak-based apps attach a penalty to the exact moment you were most likely to lapse, which reliably converts one missed day into a deleted app. ADHD Superpower removes the penalty entirely and puts the reward on starting instead.

Do I need an account to use it?

No. Download it and start — no email, no password, no onboarding survey. The app is local-first, so everything lives on your phone. An account is only needed if you want your data synced to a second device, and that's the only thing anyone ever pays for.

Does it work offline?

Completely. Every action writes to your phone first and never waits on a network call. Planes, tunnels, basements, dead zones — the app behaves identically. This isn't a fallback mode; it's how the app is built, and syncing was added on top of it afterwards.

What happens if I stop using it for two weeks?

Nothing bad. There is no streak to lose and no number that resets. Your momentum drifts gently downward toward Resting, and those two weeks appear on the chart as a gap, not as a row of zeros.

When you come back, one 25-minute block starts pulling the line up again. This is the single most deliberate design decision in the whole app.

Is this a medical treatment for ADHD?

No, and it would be irresponsible to imply otherwise. ADHD Superpower is a productivity tool, not a medical device, a therapy, or a substitute for either. It doesn't diagnose anything and it isn't clinically validated.

What it is: an app whose design decisions were made deliberately, informed by behavioural research on motivation and task initiation and shaped through my own conversations in therapy — rather than by copying whatever the last productivity app did.

Can I use it on my Mac as well?

Yes — there's a desktop companion, and it holds the same records. Keeping the two in sync is exactly what the paid tier covers, since that's the part that costs real money to run.

Who is this actually for?

People who have already tried the beautiful apps, the paper planner, the wall of sticky notes and the app with the tree that dies. People who don't need another system — they need the gap between deciding and starting to get smaller.

You don't need a diagnosis to find it useful. Plenty of people just work this way.

Lit

The next twenty-five minutes are available.

That's all this needs from you. Not a new system, not a better week, not a version of yourself that has finally got it together. One block. The app will take it from there.

Download free on the App Store

Free foreverNo accountNo streaks to break

ADHD Superpower is a productivity app. It is not a medical device and does not diagnose, treat, cure or prevent any condition, including ADHD. It is not a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, therapy or medication. If you're struggling, please talk to a qualified clinician. Screenshots show demonstration data.