Guide45 min read
How to Use braindump.work: The Complete Step-by-Step Guide
The full operating manual for braindump.work — from first signup to your hundredth weekly review. Dashboard outlines, the four-layer hierarchy, AI prioritization, every module explained, common mistakes, troubleshooting.
This is the complete operating manual for braindump.work. It is intentionally long. The product has more depth than the marketing page can show, and an article that explains it properly is more useful than ten articles that explain it shallowly. If you are coming to braindump.work for the first time and want a comprehensive guide that takes you from signup to the hundredth weekly review, this is the document for you.
We will move through the mental model, the first-time setup, every screen, every module, every ritual the product is designed to support, and the common mistakes operators make when they are still building the muscle. By the end of the article you will know more about how to actually run your week on braindump.work than 95% of current users do, because most users learn it by trial and error and the trial-and-error version is slow.
A note on format. The article uses ASCII-art dashboard outlines and flow diagrams to communicate visual layout in a medium (markdown) that does not naturally support screenshots. You can compare these outlines to what you see on screen and the mental model should map cleanly. The outlines are simplified — the real interface has more polish — but the structure they convey is exact.
If you have not signed up yet, start free here and keep this article open in another tab. You will get more out of it if you can click through as you read.
Section 1 — The mental model
Before any screen or any feature, the single most important thing to understand about braindump.work is the four-layer hierarchy. Almost every design decision in the product follows from it. If you grasp this in the next ten minutes, everything else becomes easy. If you skip it and try to learn the product by exploring the menus, you will be productive in a few days, but you will plateau within a few weeks because you will not understand why the product is shaped the way it is.
The hierarchy is:
┌─────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│ LIFE GOAL │
│ "Build the company. Write the book. │
│ Be a present parent." │
│ 3 to 5. Long arc. Defended sentences. │
└────────────────────┬────────────────────────────┘
│
▼
┌─────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│ OBJECTIVE │
│ "Land ten paying pilots this quarter." │
│ 3 to 5 total. Quarterly. Concrete. │
└────────────────────┬────────────────────────────┘
│
▼
┌─────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│ PROBLEM │
│ "The onboarding drops at step 3." │
│ 2 to 3 per objective. Constraint, not action. │
└────────────────────┬────────────────────────────┘
│
▼
┌─────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│ TASK │
│ "Watch 5 customer recordings of step 3." │
│ 30 min to 2 hours. Concrete. Finishable. │
└─────────────────────────────────────────────────┘
Each layer answers a different question. Life goals answer why does any of this matter. Objectives answer what gets me there this quarter. Problems answer what is actually in the way right now. Tasks answer what is the next 30-minute thing I will do. The questions are not interchangeable. Most other productivity tools collapse them, and the collapse is precisely why they hit a ceiling at week four — when every task floats without a goal underneath, the prioritization becomes guessing.
Why three to five at each level rather than ten? Concentration. A person actively pursuing three life goals can hold them in working memory all week. A person with ten cannot — the brain quietly drops seven and keeps three, but you do not know which seven the brain dropped, so you make plans that depend on goals the brain has already abandoned. Three to five is the load-bearing constraint. Most operators we know who tried to run nine objectives in a quarter shipped two of them. Most who ran three shipped 2.5. The math is paradoxical but reliable.
There is a fifth thing the hierarchy does not contain, and it deserves a brief note. Notes — the markdown writing you do for thinking, references, meeting captures — exist in their own surface alongside the hierarchy. They are not in the hierarchy because they are not actions; they are artifacts. But they can be attached to any layer (a note about a problem, a draft for an objective, the meeting notes that produced a task). Think of notes as the second brain, sitting beside the hierarchy and feeding it.
Now that the mental model is in place, the rest of the article walks through how to actually use the surfaces the product provides to make this hierarchy live.
Section 2 — First-time setup (Day 1)
The first day on braindump.work should take about 45 minutes, possibly an hour if you want to be thorough. Block it. The investment is worth it because the alternative is poking at the product over weeks and never settling.
Step 1: sign up and the welcome flow
Sign up at /signin?mode=signup with email and a password of twelve characters or more. The signup is fast — no email verification ceremony, no payment screen, no team invitation steps. You land on a welcome page that walks you through three setup screens.
┌──────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│ │
│ Welcome to braindump.work │
│ │
│ Three quick steps to set up your hierarchy. │
│ │
│ [ Step 1 ] · Step 2 · Step 3 │
│ │
│ What are 1-3 life goals you actually care │
│ about? │
│ │
│ ┌──────────────────────────────────────────┐ │
│ │ Build the company to 10k users │ │
│ └──────────────────────────────────────────┘ │
│ │
│ [ + Add another ] │
│ │
│ [ Continue → ] │
│ │
└──────────────────────────────────────────────────┘
The welcome flow is the only place in the product that nudges you toward the hierarchy explicitly. Take it seriously. The setup decisions you make here will sit in front of you for the next three months. If you race through and accept defaults, you will be re-doing the work in February.
Step 2: write your life goals
The first welcome step asks you to name one to three life goals. You can add more later, but the welcome screen caps at three because three is enough to start. Each goal is a sentence — written, not a phrase, not a category.
Examples of well-shaped life goals:
- Build a software company that’s still mine in ten years.
- Write a novel I’d be proud to put my name on.
- Be a present parent — physically and emotionally — through my kids’ first 18 years.
- Reach financial independence by 55 without sacrificing what makes life worth living.
- Become a top-1% practitioner in my field, not because of credentials but because of work.
Examples of poorly-shaped life goals to avoid:
- Get healthier. — Vague. No version of “I went for a walk” can disqualify success, which means no version can claim it either.
- Make more money. — No version of the goal is ever finished. Will always be open.
- Be a better person. — Aspirational without operational meaning. Won’t survive contact with a busy Tuesday.
The defend test is: would you defend this sentence to someone who challenged it? If the answer is yes, write it down. If you stall, rewrite until you would.
You can edit life goals later. The first version does not need to be perfect; it needs to be honest enough that the rest of the system has something real to attach to.
Step 3: write the first quarter’s objectives
The second welcome step asks for one to three objectives for the current quarter. An objective is what would move a life goal forward this quarter. It is concrete enough to be checked at quarter end.
A good objective passes four tests:
- It serves a named life goal. Every objective has a parent. If the objective doesn’t visibly serve a life goal, you have either an extra objective or a missing life goal.
- It’s time-bound to this quarter. Not “this year” or “someday.” This quarter. Three months from when you set it.
- It’s checkable. At the end of the quarter, you can answer yes or no — did I do this.
- It’s concentrated. Three to five objectives total across all your life goals, not three to five per life goal.
Examples:
| Life goal | Q3 objective |
|---|---|
| Build the company to 10k users | Land 10 paying pilots |
| Write the novel | Finish the first four chapters at draft quality |
| Be a present parent | Move work to entirely between 8am and 5pm — no exceptions |
Notice the shape: each objective is concrete, time-bound, and connected to a life goal. Notice also the discipline: only three total. You may want six. You will ship more by picking three.
Step 4: name the problems (optional in welcome, important within Day 1)
The welcome flow doesn’t ask for problems explicitly — it lets you skip ahead — but you should sit down on Day 1 and name two to three problems per objective. A problem is the constraint that’s actually in the way of the objective. It is not a task. It is not a deadline. It is the structural reason the objective hasn’t already happened.
For Land 10 paying pilots, problems might be:
- We can’t articulate the value prop in under 30 seconds.
- Onboarding drops at step 3 in the new flow.
- We don’t know which industry segment to lead with.
Each of those is a constraint. They aren’t actions; they are the structural reasons the objective is hard. Once they are named, the task layer becomes obvious — what tasks would solve each problem.
Step 5: capture the first ten to fifteen tasks
The final Day 1 step is loading the task layer with the first one to two weeks of work. For each problem, list the next two to four tasks. Keep them concrete: thirty minutes to two hours each, finishable in one block, with a clear “done” state.
Examples for We can’t articulate the value prop in under 30 seconds:
- Write five candidate one-liners.
- Test them with three customers this week (15 minutes each).
- Pick the strongest and rewrite the homepage hero copy.
By the end of Day 1, you should have something that looks like this:
3 life goals ←── decade-arc
│
├── 3 objectives (this quarter)
│ │
│ └── 2-3 problems per objective
│ │
│ └── 2-4 tasks per problem
│ (this week)
▼
That's roughly:
- 3 life goals
- 3 objectives
- 8-9 problems
- 20-30 tasks
That’s the right starting density. It will feel sparse compared to whatever task pile you were carrying before. The sparseness is the point.
Section 3 — A tour of the Today dashboard
Once setup is done, your daily home is the Today page. Bookmark it. The desktop install of braindump.work as a PWA opens directly to /today. Everything you need on a normal workday is visible here, scrollable in one column.
The Today page has five primary sections, arranged top-to-bottom in the order you need them through the day. Here is the ASCII outline of the full layout:
┌────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│ │
│ ── Hero strip ────────────────────────────────────────────────── │
│ │
│ Good morning, Avinash. Wed · Jun 25, 2026 │
│ │
│ 09:34 AM │
│ Wednesday │
│ │
│ Today's main goal │
│ ★ Ship the new landing page │
│ │
│ "What you do every day matters more than │
│ what you do once in a while." — Gretchen Rubin │
│ │
│ ── Activity + rings ──────────────────────────────────────────── │
│ │
│ Focus Tasks Habits Days streak │
│ ◐ 90m ◑ 3/5 ◐ 4/4 12 │
│ │
│ ── Focused tasks card ───────────────────────────────────────── │
│ │
│ Focused tasks AI ranked │
│ ───────────────────────────────────────────── │
│ AI #1 ☐ Rewrite the value prop P2 · 90m │
│ → solves "Value prop unclear" under │
│ "Land 10 paying pilots" │
│ │
│ AI #2 ☐ Watch 5 customer recordings of step 3 P2 · 60m │
│ → solves "Onboarding drops at step 3" │
│ │
│ AI #3 ☐ Pick industry segment to lead with P3 · 45m │
│ │
│ [ + Show more ] [ ⚡ Re-prioritize ] │
│ │
│ ── Habits row ───────────────────────────────────────────────── │
│ │
│ Today's habits │
│ ☑ 500 words written ☑ Morning walk │
│ ☐ Phone away 6-9pm ☐ Evening shutdown │
│ │
│ ── Calendar snapshot ───────────────────────────────────────── │
│ │
│ Today's schedule │
│ 09:00 - 10:30 Deep work block (you) │
│ 11:00 - 11:45 Inbox window │
│ 13:00 - 14:00 Sales call · Acme Co │
│ 15:00 - 15:30 1:1 with co-founder │
│ 17:30 - 18:00 Shutdown ritual │
│ │
│ ── Mood + reflection ───────────────────────────────────────── │
│ │
│ Mood last 7 days ●─●─●─◐─●─●─○ │
│ │
│ [ Print as PDF ] [ Open week view ] │
│ │
└────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘
Let’s walk through each section.
The hero strip. The top of the page sets the day. The greeting uses your first name. The clock is real-time and updates without page reload. Today’s main goal — the single most important thing you committed to last night during the shutdown ritual — sits in a starred line at the top. If there is no main goal, the field is empty and prompts you to set one. The quote of the day is a curated rotation; it changes once per day and stays the same on subsequent visits that day so it does not become noise.
The activity rings. A glanceable view of the day so far. Focus minutes (Pomodoro time logged), tasks done versus tasks planned, habits checked off versus habits scheduled, current streak in days. The rings update live as you work. They are diagnostic, not motivational — they exist to tell you the truth about the day, not to push you.
The focused tasks card. The heart of the Today view. AI-ranked tasks from your hierarchy. Each task shows three lines: the task itself, a “solves X under Y” trace up the hierarchy (so you see why the AI ranked it where it did), and a small metadata strip (priority, estimated time). The first task — AI #1 — is the one we believe matters most given your active objectives. You can drag tasks up or down to override; the override is logged and informs the next prioritization run.
The Re-prioritize button reruns the AI ranking. By default the ranking is fresh from this morning. If your week’s situation has materially changed — a customer fire, a board ask — re-prioritize. It is not punished; it is not metered to you. Click it as often as the situation warrants.
The habits row. Today’s habits, with their check states. Tap or click to check off. The recent history (two weeks of dots) is visible if you click the habit, but the Today view shows only today’s state to keep the surface clean. If you have no habits set up yet, the row is empty and prompts you toward /habits.
The calendar snapshot. Today’s events from Google Calendar (if connected). Two-way sync — any event you create in braindump.work shows up in Google Calendar within seconds, and vice versa. This card answers “what does the day actually look like” without opening another tab.
Mood and reflection. A small sparkline of the last seven days of mood check-ins. If you do not run a mood-tracking habit, this is empty. The Print as PDF button generates a printer-friendly version of the Today page (useful for clients, advisors, anyone you want to share your plan with).
Read the Today view top to bottom each morning during the morning ritual. Tap the AI #1 task to start your day.
Section 4 — The brain dump workflow
The product is named after one workflow specifically: the brain dump. It is the entry point for everything that ends up in your hierarchy, and it is the surface that the AI extraction feature shines in.
When to brain dump
The trigger is internal. You brain dump when:
- Your head is full and you can sense the cognitive load. Sleep is suffering. You are missing things. Decisions are getting harder.
- A defined period has just ended — a quarter, a launch, a vacation. Something is closing and something else is starting.
- A meeting just generated twenty action items and you do not want to process them in your head.
A useful baseline: a full brain dump every 3-4 weeks, a short one during each weekly review. The exact cadence varies by life phase. Listen to the signal: if your head feels too full, dump.
How to brain dump in braindump.work
Open /braindump from the sidebar or the global Create menu. The surface is intentionally minimal:
┌──────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│ │
│ Brain dump │
│ │
│ Paste whatever's in your head. Do not edit. │
│ The AI will extract tasks in a moment. │
│ │
│ ┌────────────────────────────────────────────┐ │
│ │ │ │
│ │ email sarah re: Tuesday demo │ │
│ │ finish the investor update by Wed │ │
│ │ call mom this weekend │ │
│ │ the onboarding drop at step 3 is killing │ │
│ │ me, we need to look at this │ │
│ │ why doesn't the landing page convert, │ │
│ │ i don't even know │ │
│ │ pick airbnb in lisbon for retreat │ │
│ │ hire engineering #1 — sourcing is bad │ │
│ │ team is overloaded, talk to lead │ │
│ │ read that paper on RAG │ │
│ │ ... │ │
│ │ │ │
│ └────────────────────────────────────────────┘ │
│ │
│ [ Extract tasks → ] │
│ │
└──────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘
Three rules during the dump:
Don’t filter. Anything that comes to mind, write it down. The dump is for the cognitive offload, not for the aesthetic of having a clean list. If you filter, you defeat the point.
Don’t categorize. Tasks, problems, ideas, complaints, observations — they all go in mixed together. The AI will sort them. Trying to pre-sort makes the dump slower without making the output better.
Use whatever shorthand you naturally use. No need to write full sentences. email sarah re: tuesday demo is fine. finish investor update wed is fine. The model is built to handle informal phrasing.
Aim for forty to a hundred items. Most operators underestimate how much they’re carrying. The dump that looks complete after fifteen items usually had thirty more items lurking. Keep going for thirty minutes.
The extraction step
When you click Extract tasks, the AI processes your wall of text and produces a structured list:
┌──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│ │
│ AI-extracted from your dump (18 items) │
│ │
│ Tasks │
│ ────── │
│ ☐ Email Sarah re: Tuesday demo │
│ ☐ Finish investor update due Wed │
│ ☐ Call mom this weekend │
│ ☐ Pick Airbnb in Lisbon for retreat │
│ ☐ Read RAG paper │
│ ... │
│ │
│ Problems │
│ ───────── │
│ ◇ Onboarding drops at step 3 │
│ ◇ Landing page doesn't convert │
│ ◇ Engineering sourcing pipeline is empty │
│ │
│ Reflections │
│ ─────────── │
│ • Team is overloaded — talk to lead │
│ │
│ [ Edit ] [ Commit all to hierarchy → ] │
│ │
└──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘
Each item shows up as an editable row. You can edit, delete, merge, split — whatever the AI got slightly wrong, you correct in this step. The extraction is a draft. Your judgment is the final.
When you click Commit all to hierarchy, the items get routed:
- Tasks go into your task list, unassigned to a problem by default. You will route them in the next step.
- Problems go into a problems holding area; you assign each to an objective.
- Reflections go into a notes inbox; you can edit them into a journal entry, attach them to a problem, or discard.
Routing into the hierarchy
After extraction, you spend ten minutes assigning each task to a problem (and each problem to an objective if you named new ones). The surface looks like this:
┌─────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│ │
│ Route 12 new tasks │
│ │
│ ☐ Email Sarah re: Tuesday demo │
│ Problem: [ Customer demos preparation ▼ ] │
│ │
│ ☐ Finish investor update │
│ Problem: [ Investor relations Q3 ▼ ] │
│ │
│ ☐ Pick Airbnb in Lisbon for retreat │
│ Problem: [ Team retreat logistics ▼ ] │
│ │
│ ☐ Read RAG paper │
│ Problem: [ ??? ] [ + Create new ] │
│ │
│ [ Commit routing → ] │
│ │
└─────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘
Two patterns you will see:
Some tasks have an obvious home. The dropdown will surface the right problem from your existing hierarchy.
Some tasks don’t have a home yet. Either they need a new problem (you create it inline) or they don’t belong in your current hierarchy at all and should go to the Someday list.
The Someday list is the parking lot for things that aren’t current-quarter work. You revisit it at the quarterly review. Things often look less important from the Someday list than they did when you wrote them.
By the end of routing, the brain dump is fully processed. Your head is clear, the tasks are in their right places, and the next Today view will pick up everything in the AI ranking.
Section 5 — AI prioritization: how to use it well
The AI ranking is the feature most operators underuse. They open the Today view, see the AI-ranked list, and either trust it blindly (suboptimal) or ignore it and decide manually (also suboptimal). The high-leverage move is collaborate with it.
What the AI considers
When you click Prioritize, the model sees:
- All your active tasks (not done, not in the Someday list, with their metadata: priority hint, urgency, impact, effort, due date).
- Your active objectives, with their target dates.
- Your life goals, with their dates if any.
- Recent context — what shipped in the past week, what slipped, recent overrides you made.
- Your time-of-day if relevant.
The model is prompted to rank by which task most advances your active objectives this week. It weighs urgency, impact, effort, and alignment to objectives. It is not optimizing for “what feels urgent” — it is optimizing for what moves your stated goals.
What the AI shows you
For each ranked task, you see:
AI #2 ☐ Watch 5 customer recordings of step 3 P2 · 60m
→ solves "Onboarding drops at step 3"
under "Land 10 paying pilots"
why: this task directly observes the
drop you said is blocking the quarter's
objective. Quick to do; high signal.
The why line is the model’s reasoning. Read it. If it makes sense, trust the rank. If it doesn’t, override.
When to override
Override when:
- You have context the model doesn’t. I can’t do this task today because the person I need to talk to is on vacation. Drag it down.
- The model misjudged effort. This is going to take all day, not 60 minutes. Drag it down or break it into smaller tasks.
- A real emergency just landed. Add the new task at AI #1 manually. The model didn’t know.
- Your gut says something. Trust the gut, especially in week one and two. The model learns your overrides over time.
Override sparingly. If you find yourself overriding 50% or more of the rankings, the model is missing context. Either your objectives aren’t well-stated, or your tasks aren’t well-attached to problems, or both. Spend a weekly review fixing the upstream, not the AI.
Re-prioritizing
Re-prioritize whenever the situation materially changes. A board call moved up. A customer escalation arrived. You finished a task that the model didn’t expect to be done by today. The Re-prioritize button is at the bottom of the focused tasks card; one click and the list updates.
Most operators we know re-prioritize 1-2 times per week. Some re-prioritize daily; others run with the morning ranking and accept it for the whole day. Both are fine. The system is built to support either cadence.
Section 6 — The daily flow
The Today dashboard is the surface. The flow is the choreography of opening it, working from it, and closing the day around it. This section walks through what a healthy day on braindump.work looks like, hour by hour.
6:00-7:30 AM — Launch
Wake. Hydrate. Eat something simple. Don’t open braindump.work yet. The launch phase is for body and mind preparation; the planning surface comes next.
If you have a movement habit, it goes here. 20-30 minutes outside is the right baseline.
7:30-7:45 AM — Morning ritual
Open braindump.work. Open the Today view.
Step 1: Read the hero strip.
- What's today's main goal?
- Is it still the right one?
Step 2: Read the AI-ranked focused tasks.
- Does the AI #1 still feel right?
- Drag to reorder if anything jumps out.
Step 3: Read the calendar snapshot.
- Any meetings I forgot?
- Any conflicts with the deep-work block?
Step 4: Update Today's main goal if needed.
- It should be the one thing that, if
accomplished today, makes the day count.
Ten to fifteen minutes total. The morning ritual primes the day. You walk into the deep-work block already knowing what is happening.
8:00-10:30 AM — Deep work block
This is the most valuable block of the day. Phone in another room. Slack closed. Email closed. Browser open to one tab — the one related to your AI #1 task.
The block is 90-150 minutes of focused work on the AI #1 task. If you finish AI #1 before the block ends, move to AI #2. If a task is too big for the block, break it down in the moment — the goal is to ship something concrete by the end.
Mark the task done in braindump.work the moment it’s actually done. The dopamine hit of crossing it off is real, and the activity rings update in real time.
10:30-11:00 AM — Break
A real break. Walk. Coffee. Stretch. Not Slack, not scroll. Fifteen minutes minimum.
11:00-11:45 AM — Inbox window
Now (and not before) is the first inbox session. Open email. Triage using the 4-bucket method:
- Reply now (under 2 minutes).
- Schedule (convert to a task in braindump.work, route to a problem, archive the email).
- Waiting on (move to a “waiting on” list with a follow-up date, archive).
- Reference (archive with a tag).
The “Schedule” bucket is where the integration with braindump.work earns its keep. An email that becomes a task goes into your inbox-of-captures, routes into the hierarchy at the end of the day or during the weekly review, and gets ranked alongside everything else.
12:00-1:00 PM — Lunch
A real lunch. Away from the desk. Forty-five minutes minimum. Walk if you can.
1:00-4:00 PM — People block (meetings)
Your meetings cluster here. Calendar events show on the Today view; click any event to expand and see notes. Use Granola or the equivalent meeting-transcriber to capture meeting content without taking notes manually. After each meeting, a one-minute follow-up: any action items become tasks in braindump.work via quick capture (keyboard shortcut “C”).
4:00-4:20 PM — Afternoon triage
Open the Today view. New tasks from the inbox window? New action items from meetings? Twenty minutes to handle them: route each to a problem, mark anything that’s a quick five-minute fix as done, push anything bigger to tomorrow.
4:20-5:30 PM — Second work block
The afternoon’s cognitive capacity is lower than the morning’s. Use this block for shipping rather than thinking. Finish the morning task if you didn’t. Get the PR merged. Send the email that wraps the work. Ship what you started.
5:30-5:45 PM — Evening shutdown ritual
The bookend to the morning ritual. The most underrated routine in the product.
Step 1: Open Today view.
Step 2: Mark anything done that's done.
Step 3: Move undone tasks to tomorrow or back to
the problem they came from.
Step 4: Pick tomorrow's main goal — the one thing
that, if done, makes tomorrow count.
Step 5: Close the laptop.
Five minutes. Every workday. The reason it matters: the planning load doesn’t follow you into the evening. The brain releases the open loops because the system has them. Sleep gets better. Tomorrow’s morning ritual starts faster.
6:00 PM onward — Off
Be off. Not “checking braindump.work occasionally” off — actually off. The system doesn’t need you in the evening; you need the evening off.
Section 7 — The weekly review
Sunday or Monday morning, twenty-five minutes, the single highest-leverage ritual in the product. The /weekly route in braindump.work has a dedicated surface for this.
Open it on Sunday morning with coffee. Here’s the layout:
┌──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│ │
│ Weekly review — Sunday, June 22 │
│ │
│ ── This past week ───────────────────────────────── │
│ │
│ Tasks shipped 12 / 18 planned │
│ Hours focused 9.5 (4 deep-work blocks) │
│ Habits maintained 4 / 5 │
│ │
│ ── Active objectives ───────────────────────────── │
│ │
│ ◐ Land 10 paying pilots 3 of 10 signed │
│ Problems: │
│ ◐ Value prop unclear in progress │
│ ✓ Onboarding step 3 shipped │
│ ◐ Industry segment waiting │
│ │
│ ◐ Ship MVP this quarter 75% complete │
│ ◑ Hire engineer #1 screening 4 cands │
│ │
│ ── This week's plan ────────────────────────────── │
│ │
│ Pick this week's 3 outcomes: │
│ 1. Land pilot #4 (Acme Co) │
│ 2. Ship the value prop rewrite │
│ 3. Decide on industry segment │
│ │
│ Tasks under each outcome ↓ │
│ │
│ ── Calendar pass ──────────────────────────────── │
│ │
│ Deep-work blocks defended: Mon, Tue, Thu │
│ Meeting clusters: Wed pm, Thu pm │
│ Off-day: Saturday │
│ │
│ [ Lock in the week → ] │
│ │
└──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘
Walk through it in this order:
Step 1 — Read the past week (5 min). What shipped vs what was planned. Where did the gaps appear? Was it a system failure or a real disruption? Note any patterns.
Step 2 — Update the hierarchy (5 min). Are the objectives still right? Has any problem been solved or reframed? Mark problems done as done. Add new problems if they surfaced.
Step 3 — Pick the week’s three (4 min). Three outcomes — not tasks — that, if accomplished, would make next week count. Three, not five. Concentration wins.
Step 4 — Decompose to tasks (5 min). For each of the three outcomes, list the specific tasks. Each task gets attached to a problem. Each task is finishable in 30 min - 2 hours.
Step 5 — Calendar pass (3 min). Defend the deep-work blocks. Cluster the meetings. Confirm the off-day.
Step 6 — Brain dump anything that surfaced (3 min). During the review, you’ll think of things. Capture them in the brain dump tab and route after the review.
Twenty-five minutes. The /weekly view does the heavy lifting of pulling the past week’s data; you just have to read and decide.
For the deeper rationale on why the weekly review compounds more than any other ritual, see How to run a weekly review in 25 minutes.
Section 8 — Monthly, quarterly, and annual reviews
The weekly is the workhorse. The longer-arc reviews are the strategic check-ins.
Monthly review (15-20 min, first Sunday of the month)
The /monthly route. Lighter than the weekly because most of the work is already done. The questions:
- Look at the past four weekly reviews. What patterns emerged?
- Are the active objectives still progressing meaningfully? Any stalled?
- Are any habits decaying? Time to retire or refresh?
- Any structural issues with the system itself — am I opening it daily, is the trust still there?
The monthly is a sanity check on the week-by-week execution. If something’s drifting, the monthly catches it before the quarterly does.
Quarterly review (90-120 min, last Sunday of the quarter)
The /quarterly route. The major refresh of the hierarchy. The agenda:
Step 1 (15 min): Read this quarter.
- What did I commit to? What shipped?
- Honest grading of each objective.
Step 2 (15 min): Reflect.
- What surprised me?
- What worked? What didn't?
- What did I learn that I didn't know in April?
Step 3 (30 min): Update life goals.
- Are they still felt?
- Any to retire, any to add?
- Three to five, no more.
Step 4 (30 min): Pick next quarter's objectives.
- Three to five total.
- Each connected to a life goal.
- Each with two to three problems named.
Step 5 (15 min): Front-load the first two weeks.
- For each problem, draft the first 2-4 tasks.
- This becomes Week 1 of the new quarter.
Step 6 (5 min): Schedule the reviews.
- Next weekly is on the calendar.
- Next monthly is on the calendar.
- Next quarterly is on the calendar.
The quarterly is where most of the strategic thinking happens. The weekly executes against the quarterly’s plan; the quarterly sets what the plan is.
Annual review (3 hours, between Dec 22 and Jan 8)
The biggest of the rituals. The /annual route. Eight steps, walked through in our standalone article Annual review template 2026. The shortened version inside braindump.work:
1. Read last year's annual review.
2. Name the year in one paragraph.
3. Rate six dimensions (work, money, health, etc.).
4. Surface the surprises.
5. Identify what's structurally not working.
6. Pick three keystone outcomes for next year.
7. Refresh the four-layer hierarchy.
8. Install the maintenance cadence.
Three hours, once a year. The single highest-leverage planning ritual in the product.
Section 9 — The other modules
Beyond the hierarchy and the Today view, braindump.work has supporting modules that integrate into the same surface. None of them are bolted on — each one was designed to slot into the planning ritual.
Notes & notebooks
A markdown note-taking surface with full-text search. Notes can be:
- Free-floating (unattached to the hierarchy) — your thinking pad.
- Attached to a life goal, objective, problem, or task — the context for that node.
- Organized into notebooks (colored, optional) — your second-brain folders.
The editor is a Tiptap-based WYSIWYG with markdown shortcuts. You can paste a markdown blob and it renders correctly (smart heuristic detects whether the paste is markdown or literal). You can toggle to HTML-source view for the rare case where you want raw HTML.
Each note has a pin function and a delete (soft, recoverable for 30 days). You can print any single note as a PDF for offline reading.
┌──────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│ │
│ Notes [ + New ] [ All ▼ ] [ Search... ] │
│ │
│ ┌───────────────────────────────────────────────┐ │
│ │ ★ Sales playbook v2 │ │
│ │ Updated 2h ago │ │
│ │ For Acme demo on Tuesday │ │
│ ├───────────────────────────────────────────────┤ │
│ │ Engineering candidate evaluation │ │
│ │ Yesterday │ │
│ │ Notes from the 4 take-homes │ │
│ ├───────────────────────────────────────────────┤ │
│ │ Q3 planning thoughts │ │
│ │ Last week │ │
│ └───────────────────────────────────────────────┘ │
│ │
│ Tip: Press C to capture from anywhere │
│ │
└──────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘
The notes search uses Postgres tsvector with a GIN index. Searches are fast even at thousands of notes.
For the deeper philosophy of notes as a second brain, see How to build a second brain.
Habits
Daily check-ins with recent-history visualization. No punitive streak resets. The /habits route:
┌──────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│ │
│ Habits │
│ │
│ ── 500 words written ────────────────────────── │
│ For: Write the novel │
│ Cue: After morning coffee │
│ │
│ Last 14 days: ● ● ● ○ ● ● ● ● ● ○ ● ● ● ● │
│ This week: 4/5 │
│ │
│ [ Check in today ] │
│ │
│ ── Morning walk ─────────────────────────────── │
│ For: Productivity + health │
│ Cue: After breakfast │
│ │
│ Last 14 days: ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● │
│ This week: 5/5 │
│ │
│ [ Check in today ] │
│ │
└──────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘
Each habit has a why field and a cue field, made visible during check-in. The recent-history dot row replaces the streak-reset pattern that punishes single misses.
For the design rationale, see The habit-tracker habit.
Finance
Personal finance hygiene — transactions, categories, budgets, recurring items, monthly compare. Not investment tracking; that’s outside scope.
┌──────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│ │
│ Finance · June 2026 │
│ │
│ Income: $12,400 │
│ Spent: $8,210 (66% of income) │
│ Saved: $4,190 │
│ │
│ By category (top 5): │
│ Housing $2,800 ──────────────────── │
│ Food $1,150 ────────── │
│ Travel $1,890 ────────────── │
│ Health $620 ────── │
│ SaaS $410 ──── │
│ │
│ Recurring (this month): │
│ ✓ Rent $2,800 │
│ ✓ Internet $80 │
│ ⏳ Phone bill $65 due 6/28 │
│ │
│ vs May: Spent -$340 Saved +$520 │
│ │
└──────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘
The finance module integrates with your hierarchy lightly — a budget category can be attached to a life goal (e.g., retirement savings attached to Reach financial independence by 55). The monthly compare view surfaces trends across categories so you can spot creep before it becomes a problem.
Focus timer (Pomodoro)
Pomodoro with browser notifications. 25 minutes of work, 5 minutes of break, with longer break after four cycles. The /focus route:
┌──────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│ │
│ Focus session │
│ │
│ ╭───────────────────────╮ │
│ │ │ │
│ │ 18:42 │ │
│ │ │ │
│ │ remaining │ │
│ │ │ │
│ ╰───────────────────────╯ │
│ │
│ Working on: Rewrite the value prop │
│ │
│ Cycle 2 of 4 │
│ │
│ ◐ ◐ ○ ○ │
│ │
│ [ Pause ] [ Skip break ] │
│ │
└──────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘
Each completed Pomodoro logs to your activity rings on the Today view. The focus minutes accumulate, giving you a real metric on how much focused work you actually did today.
For the pros and cons of Pomodoro vs deep work, see Pomodoro vs Deep Work vs Time Boxing.
Calendar (Google Calendar 2-way sync)
The /calendar route shows your week with day-view, week-view, and month-view tabs. Two-way sync with Google Calendar: events you create in braindump.work appear in Google Calendar within seconds; events created in Google appear in braindump.work via the cron pull (every 10 minutes).
┌──────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│ │
│ [ Day ] [ Week ] [ Month ] Jun 22-28, 2026 │
│ │
│ Mon Tue Wed Thu Fri │
│ 08:00 ───── ───── ───── ───── ───── │
│ 09:00 [DW] [DW] Mtg [DW] ───── │
│ 10:00 [DW] [DW] ───── [DW] ───── │
│ 11:00 Inbox Inbox Inbox Inbox Inbox │
│ 12:00 Lunch Lunch Lunch Lunch Lunch │
│ 13:00 Sales 1:1 Mtg ───── Demo │
│ 14:00 ───── ───── Mtg ───── Demo │
│ 15:00 ───── Mtg ───── 1:1 ───── │
│ 16:00 Ship Ship Ship Ship Ship │
│ 17:00 Shut Shut Shut Shut Shut │
│ │
│ [ + New event ] │
│ │
└──────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘
The calendar is also where you defend the deep-work blocks (created as events with the DW label). The visible block tells your colleagues not to schedule against you.
Karma
A small reward system. Points for tasks done, habits checked in, objectives completed, life goals achieved. Confetti on big milestones (life goal achieved, 100-day habit streak). Sparingly used — the system is deliberately not gamified to manipulate engagement.
You can ignore the karma module entirely if you prefer; the rest of the product works the same without it. For some operators, the points are a small daily lift.
Books & wishlist
Two adjacent modules. Books tracks what you’re reading, what you’ve finished, ratings, dates. Wishlist tracks anything you want to buy or do — a parking lot for desires that aren’t immediate purchases.
Both modules are lightweight; they exist because most operators have these lists anyway and consolidating them into the same surface is better than running a separate app.
Morning & evening rituals
The /morning and /evening routes are dedicated surfaces for the morning and evening rituals. They walk you through the steps with prompts. If you prefer to run the rituals from the Today view directly, you can ignore these routes. If you like a more guided experience, they help.
The evening ritual surface specifically includes a gratitude / journal prompt — one thing that went well today, one thing you’d change. The entry is saved to your notes and surfaces in the weekly review.
Section 10 — Common mistakes (and how to recover)
After watching hundreds of operators learn braindump.work, the same six mistakes show up repeatedly. Here is each one with the recovery move.
Mistake 1: too many life goals
You set up seven life goals because they all felt important. By week three, you can’t remember which seven you wrote down. Worse, the AI ranking is struggling because the objectives are spread across too many goals and nothing concentrates.
Recovery. Reread the life goals. Force-rank them. Keep the top three. Archive the rest to a Someday life goals list (visible in the quarterly review). The three you keep should be the ones you’d defend in a hard conversation.
Mistake 2: orphan tasks
You captured fifty tasks during the first brain dump but didn’t route them to problems. They float in your task list, the AI ranks them awkwardly because it doesn’t know which objective they serve, and you stop trusting the ranking.
Recovery. Spend twenty minutes on Sunday during the weekly review going through orphan tasks. Either route them to a problem (creating new problems if needed) or kill them. The cleanup pays off immediately in better AI rankings.
Mistake 3: skipping the weekly review
You skipped one Sunday. Then you skipped two. By week four, the hierarchy has drifted and you’re not sure which objectives are still active. The Today view starts feeling stale because the AI is ranking against an outdated set of goals.
Recovery. Run a recovery weekly review on whatever day you have time, even if it’s Wednesday. Don’t try to make it twenty-five minutes — give it forty-five, because there’s more to catch up on. Then schedule next Sunday’s review on the calendar and don’t skip again.
Mistake 4: ignoring the AI ranking
You consistently work AI #3 and AI #4 because they feel easier than AI #1 and AI #2. After four weeks, your hardest tasks have all been deferred and you wonder why the objectives aren’t moving.
Recovery. Notice the pattern. The avoidance is real, and it’s diagnostic — you’re avoiding the heavy emotional load of the AI #1 work. The fix is to do AI #1 first thing in the morning, in the deep-work block, before you’ve decided not to. See How to stop procrastinating for the deeper version.
Mistake 5: the app becomes a graveyard
You stop opening it daily. Tasks accumulate without being processed. New captures go elsewhere because braindump.work no longer feels live. The trust is breaking.
Recovery. Do a thirty-minute reset. Open the app, mark everything you can as done or dead. Run a brain dump for everything that’s accumulated outside the app. Re-route into the hierarchy. Run a weekly review. Open the app tomorrow morning as the first thing you do. Three days of consistent opening rebuilds the trust.
Mistake 6: trying to optimize before the system is alive
You spend hours customizing notifications, tweaking the dashboard, configuring keyboard shortcuts before you’ve used the product for even two weeks. The fiddling becomes the productivity work, which is itself a procrastination pattern.
Recovery. Use the defaults for thirty days. Don’t customize anything. After thirty days, you’ll know what actually needs adjustment and what was aesthetic. The early customization usually optimizes for problems you don’t actually have.
Section 11 — Pro tips
Once the basics are running, these patterns produce additional leverage.
Keyboard shortcuts. Press ? from anywhere to see the full list. The most-used ones:
C— Capture (open quick-capture modal from anywhere)G + T— Go to TodayG + W— Go to WeeklyG + N— Go to NotesCmd+K(orCtrl+K) — Command palette / search
Install as a PWA. From the /download page, install braindump.work as a desktop or mobile app. The PWA opens directly to /today, works offline for reading, and lives in your dock without a browser tab. The install takes 30 seconds.
Bounce-back navigation. When you edit a task or objective from a detail page, you bounce back to the page you came from rather than to a generic list. This makes “edit and continue planning” much faster.
Print as PDF. Today, Life Goals, Notes — all have a printer icon. The output is print-formatted for sharing with a client, an advisor, a partner. Useful for board meetings, planning sessions, periods without internet.
Brain dump from the lock screen. The PWA install on mobile supports voice memos that route into the brain dump inbox. Hey Siri, brain dump… and dictate. Process later in the day.
Use the Today view’s main goal as a journaling prompt. Instead of writing “Ship the landing page,” write “Ship the landing page so that I can show the new value prop to investors next week.” The longer-form goal is a clarifying nudge for the morning’s deep work.
Re-prioritize before lunch. A second AI ranking mid-day catches anything that’s shifted in the morning. Don’t do this every day, but on busy days it’s a small lift.
Attach notes to problems, not just objectives. When you work through a problem (e.g., reading customer recordings about the step-3 drop), drop the notes onto the problem itself. Future-you, dealing with the same constraint differently, will find them via search and have the context.
Section 12 — Troubleshooting
A short guide to common issues.
The AI extraction missed something. It happens — the model occasionally drops items from a dump. After committing the extraction, scan your original dump text (it’s saved in the brain dump history) and add any missed items manually. Future extractions improve as the corpus learns your shape.
The AI ranking feels off this week. Either your objectives have drifted (run the weekly review and re-anchor) or the AI is missing context (re-prioritize after updating the hierarchy). If both fail, the model itself may have had a bad run; re-prioritize once more.
A task disappeared. Soft-deleted tasks live in the trash for 30 days. /settings → Trash → restore. After 30 days the deletion is permanent.
Sync with Google Calendar is delayed. The pull cron runs every 10 minutes. If something’s missing, give it 10-15 minutes. If it’s still missing, /settings → Integrations → Google Calendar → Force sync.
Forgot password. /signin → Forgot? sends a reset email. If you don’t receive it within 5 minutes, check spam.
Want to delete your account. /settings → Account → Delete. The deletion is immediate and irreversible. Your data is wiped from production within 24 hours.
Section 12.5 — Power-user patterns
After thirty days of consistent use, a set of more sophisticated workflows opens up. These are the patterns operators converge on after the basic mechanics are automatic. None of them are necessary for the core system to work; each one adds leverage in a specific way.
Pattern 1: theme days at the objective level
Most operators run a daily rhythm. A few run a weekly rhythm where each weekday is themed to one objective. Monday is the engineering objective day. Tuesday is the sales objective day. Wednesday is the writing objective day. The AI ranking accommodates this — you set a “today’s focus objective” in the morning ritual, and the model weights tasks against that objective more heavily for the day.
The benefit is cognitive continuity. You stay in one mental mode for the entire day. The structural cost of context-switching between objectives drops to zero. The benefit shows up on the third or fourth week as you notice you’re producing meaningfully more work on each themed objective.
The pattern doesn’t work for everyone. Operators with high meeting volume across all objectives won’t be able to keep one day on one theme. Solo founders and senior independent contributors are the right fit.
Mon → Engineering objective (deep code, technical interviews)
Tue → Sales objective (customer calls, pipeline review)
Wed → Writing objective (essays, investor updates, docs)
Thu → Hiring objective (candidate reviews, calibration)
Fri → Strategic objective (planning, reading, reflection)
This is just one example mapping. The objectives that fit your specific quarter dictate the actual mapping.
Pattern 2: capture-on-the-go with voice
If you’ve installed the PWA on mobile, the capture-via-voice flow is the lowest-friction capture available. The pattern:
- During a walk, an idea or task surfaces.
- Hey Siri, brain dump — opens the PWA’s voice-capture surface.
- Speak the item.
- Process during the next inbox window.
The friction reduction is significant. Most operators report capturing 2-4x more items once voice-on-the-go is installed, which means the planning surface is much more complete and the AI ranking has better signal.
Pattern 3: notes-as-thinking-pad
Some operators use a daily-notes-style pattern alongside the hierarchy. Every morning, a fresh note is created (named with the date). The note is the thinking pad for the day — half-formed ideas, problem articulations, post-mortem notes from yesterday’s work, anything that doesn’t yet belong in a structured place.
At end-of-day, you review the daily note. Items that became tasks get extracted into the task list. Items that became reflections get archived or attached to the relevant problem. The daily note itself stays as a chronological log of the day’s thinking.
This pattern combines well with the second-brain framing — the daily notes become the raw material from which structured outputs (essays, decisions, project documentation) emerge.
Pattern 4: weekly objective sequencing
Rather than running all objectives in parallel each week, some operators sequence — they pick one of their quarter’s objectives as the primary objective for a specific week, then heavily concentrate on it. The other objectives still progress, but only on the margins.
The pattern looks like:
Q3 (12 weeks):
Weeks 1-3: Primary objective is "Land 10 pilots"
Weeks 4-6: Primary objective is "Ship MVP"
Weeks 7-9: Primary objective is "Hire engineer"
Weeks 10-12: Back to pilots for the quarter close
Each primary-objective window gets the deep-work blocks and the most cognitively expensive hours. The benefit is concentration over time — three weeks fully on one objective often produces what twelve weeks of split attention would.
Pattern 5: the partner sync
If you have a co-founder or work spouse, sync your weekly reviews. Sunday afternoon, fifteen minutes, comparing notes. The pattern surfaces aligned priorities and catches the gap between what each person thinks the other is doing. Compound effect over a quarter: fewer dropped balls, fewer surprise conflicts, less of the I thought you were handling that tax.
The sync doesn’t replace the individual review; it sits beside it. Each person runs their own /weekly first, then the two compare for fifteen minutes.
Pattern 6: the “no new tools” pact with yourself
A subtle pattern. After installing braindump.work as your planning surface, make a pact: no new productivity tools for ninety days. The reason isn’t dogma; it’s that the temptation to add tools is itself a procrastination pattern. The new tool will not fix what is wrong. Using the existing one consistently for ninety days will reveal what is actually wrong.
After the ninety-day period, you can add tools as needed. By then, most of the tools you would have added at week one feel unnecessary.
Pattern 7: the quarterly “say no” audit
At each quarterly review, run a saying-no audit. Look at the last quarter’s calendar. Identify the commitments you said yes to that you regret. The pattern across the quarter is informative.
The follow-up: a list of standing commitments you should renegotiate or exit. The weekly recurring meeting that no longer serves. The advisor relationship that’s drifted. The side project that’s a year stale. The audit gives you the courage to make the changes that have been overdue.
Section 12.6 — When braindump.work isn’t right for you
In the spirit of honest writing, a brief section about who shouldn’t use this product. We’d rather have the conversation upfront than have you sign up, struggle for two months, and conclude the failure was personal.
You don’t have hierarchy-shaped work. If your work is structurally reactive — customer support lead, on-call engineer, hospital triage, urgent-care dispatcher — the four-layer hierarchy is overhead without benefit. Reactive work needs an interrupt-tolerant triage tool, not a planning surface that assumes you control your time. The right pick for you is a fast capture tool and a thin triage layer; the rest of braindump.work won’t earn its keep.
You have very low task volume. If you have five tasks a day and they’re all clearly important, you don’t need a system. A sticky note works. Installing a planning surface for a problem you don’t have produces friction without benefit. Come back when the task volume crosses a real threshold.
You’re in extreme transition. A new baby, a major health crisis, a complete career pivot, a divorce. These periods don’t reward installing a new planning system. They reward simpler, looser structure. The system has to map to a stable life shape; in transition, the life shape is changing too fast. Re-visit after the transition stabilizes.
You’re using the product to procrastinate on the work itself. This is the subtle one. Some operators spend hours configuring the perfect hierarchy, refining the perfect habit list, designing the perfect daily flow — and never doing the underlying work the system is supposed to enable. If you find yourself optimizing the planning surface for more than thirty minutes a day, the planning surface has become the procrastination, not the cure for it.
You don’t want to do reflection. The system depends on weekly, monthly, quarterly reflection rituals. Operators who fundamentally resist looking back at their own work cannot make the product work. The resistance is information about something — possibly worth exploring with a coach or therapist — but the productivity tool itself isn’t the intervention.
If any of these apply, we’d genuinely rather you not sign up than sign up and bounce. The product is built for a specific shape of working operator, and acknowledging the shape is part of the honest pitch.
Section 13 — What to do next
If you’ve read this far, you have enough to operate braindump.work seriously. The next steps:
This weekend. Run the Day 1 setup if you haven’t. 45 minutes. Set the hierarchy. Capture the first 15-20 tasks.
Next Sunday. Run your first weekly review. Twenty-five minutes. Use the /weekly surface.
Within 30 days. Run the brain dump cycle at least twice. Run the weekly review every Sunday. Open the Today view every workday morning.
Within 90 days. Run the monthly review at least twice. Run the quarterly review at the end of the quarter. The system will feel like an extension of how you think rather than a separate tool to maintain.
Within a year. Run the annual review in late December. The compounded effect of weekly reviews over twelve months is dramatic; most operators ship 30-60% more strategic-level work than they did in the year before they installed the system.
The biggest mistake is to read this article and not start. The second biggest is to start, hit the inevitable week-three friction, and quit. The structural payoff is on the other side of the friction. Push through to month two and the system stops feeling like work and starts feeling like clarity.
Frequently asked questions
Can I use braindump.work without setting up a hierarchy? Technically yes — you can use just the task list. Practically no. The AI prioritization assumes the hierarchy. Without it, the ranking falls back to a generic urgency-and-impact heuristic that’s worse than what you’d do manually.
Can I share the hierarchy with my team? Not currently. braindump.work is a personal OS by design — no shared workspaces. If you need team planning, pair braindump.work with a separate team tool (Linear, Asana, etc.).
How is data secured? Sessions use HttpOnly cookies with HS256-signed JWTs. Stored secrets (OpenAI keys, Google refresh tokens) are AES-256-GCM encrypted at rest. Passwords are bcrypt-hashed at cost 12. The full security posture is in /privacy.
Can I export my data? Yes. /settings → Export. You receive a JSON dump of your full hierarchy, notes, habits, and finance data. The format is documented; you can self-host or import elsewhere.
Does the AI see my personal data? The AI prioritization runs on your task titles, descriptions, and metadata, plus the structure of your hierarchy. PII redaction strips emails, phone numbers, and obvious credential patterns before the model sees them. The model is not trained on your data; prompts are not retained beyond the immediate request.
What happens if I cancel? During early access, the product is free and there’s no cancellation step — you can stop using it any time, your data stays in the system for 90 days after your last login, then is automatically deleted. After the paid tier launches, the cancellation flow will be standard.
How many tasks can I capture? No hard limit. Performance is fine at 10,000+ tasks per user. The bottleneck is your own capacity to maintain a meaningful hierarchy, not the product.
Can I use it offline? Yes for reading; writes queue and sync when you reconnect. The PWA install enables this on mobile and desktop.
Further reading
- Why braindump.work — the deeper rationale for the product’s design choices.
- What is a Personal OS — the category braindump.work belongs to.
- How to streamline your life goals — the hierarchy explained in depth.
- How to run a weekly review in 25 minutes — the workhorse ritual.
- AI task prioritization explained — what the model is actually doing.
- Annual review template 2026 — the year-level review.
- Why most productivity apps fail: the hierarchy problem — the structural argument.
TL;DR
The complete operating manual: set up the four-layer hierarchy on Day 1 (life goals → objectives → problems → tasks). Open the Today view every morning. Use the brain dump for capture, the AI ranking for prioritization, the deep-work block for execution, the shutdown ritual for closure. Run a weekly review every Sunday, a monthly review on the first Sunday of the month, a quarterly review at the end of the quarter, an annual review between December 22 and January 8.
The product is shaped around this rhythm. Once installed, it stops feeling like a tool you maintain and starts feeling like the surface on which your week happens.
braindump.work is free during early access. The fastest way to learn the rest is to start using it tomorrow morning.
Build your own personal OS.
braindump.work is the AI-powered productivity app that turns messy thoughts into a ranked, hierarchical plan — life goals, objectives, problems, tasks, and notes, all in one surface.