Features

A whole day, held lightly.

Sempa is built around four calm rituals — plan, focus, reflect, connect — and a hundred small, well-made pieces that make them feel effortless. Here's what's inside.

Plan

Start with intention, not a list.

Plan Day is a guided morning ritual: write your intention, see what carried over from yesterday, and pull tasks from your backlog into today.

The Week board is a Kanban across seven days — drag tasks between days and statuses, and set the handful of Weekly Objectives that actually matter.

  • Daily intention + carry-over from yesterday
  • Drag tasks across days and backlog → planned → in progress → done
  • A single Backlog as your inbox of ideas
Mon1
Today4 of 6
Draft the launch note
writing~45m
Clear the inbox
Focus

Protect the work that matters.

Give a task a scheduled start and end and it appears as a time-block beside your calendar. Open it in Focus mode to work distraction-free with a built-in Pomodoro.

Completed sessions are logged per task, so you can see time actually spent against your estimate — gentle feedback, not surveillance.

  • Time-boxing onto the Schedule panel
  • Pomodoro with per-task session history
  • A soft “roughly at” hint when you don't want a hard block
Focus · 25 min
18:24
Deep work · launch note
14:00 – 15:00 · time-block
Reflect

Close the day cleanly.

The Shutdown ritual walks you through ticking off what's done, rescheduling what isn't, and recording a win. The Weekly review captures wins, challenges, and your next focus.

It all collects in the Journal — a quiet timeline of intentions and reflections you can search and revisit.

  • Guided end-of-day shutdown with reschedule
  • Weekly review: wins · challenges · next focus
  • Optional contextual reflections inline on day & week screens
Reflection · Today
“Calmer when I planned the morning before opening email.”
✓ Win logged
Connect

Your email and calendar, quietly pulled in.

Star a Gmail or Fastmail message and it becomes a task. See Google, Fastmail, CalDAV and ICS calendar events beside your plan. Sync assigned Jira issues — marking one done closes the ticket.

Messy subject lines are tidied into clean task titles by a local AI model running on your own server — no email leaves your infrastructure and no API key is needed.

Per-task reminders fire by Web Push, native Android, or a webhook (ntfy, Gotify), with ten calm alert tones. Everything optional, configured after login.

  • Email → tasks (Gmail, Fastmail, forwarding inbox)
  • On-device AI title cleanup — fully local, no third party
  • Calendars: Google · Fastmail · CalDAV · ICS feeds
  • Jira two-way sync · recurring task templates
Reply to Sarah
Remind me · 2:00 PM
Mark doneSnooze 1h
Widgets

Your day, a glance away.

Keep today in view without opening the app. A floating desktop widget stays quietly above your work — always on top, a small live list of what's next.

On Android, home-screen widgets come in three sizes and tick tasks off in place — no app launch required.

  • Floating desktop widget — always-on-top, today at a glance
  • Android home-screen — 2×2 progress · 4×2 task list · 4×4 week
  • Tap a task to complete it right from the widget
Today2/4
Review MBR deck
Draft launch notes
Sync with design
2
done today
2 remaining
Lists

A home for everything
that isn't a task.

Groceries, a packing list, books to read, someday-maybe ideas — standalone checklists that live beside your day without cluttering it. Check items off in place and get to any list in a tap from the sidebar or the mobile tab bar.

Hand a jumbled list the spark and it sorts into tidy categories. Link a list to a task, export any list to Markdown, and archive it when you're done — optionally the moment its linked task is complete.

  • Drag to reorder (flat view) · check off in place · link to a task
  • Organise with AI into natural categories
  • Export to Markdown · archive when finished
Groceries3/6
Oat milk
Sourdough
Cherry tomatoes
Basil
Coffee
Parmesan
Organise
Produce
Cherry tomatoes
Basil
Bakery
Sourdough
Sorted locally
Local AI · entirely optional

Help that asks first —
and never leaves your server.

An optional assistant runs on a small language model you host yourself. It only ever suggests — you approve everything — and not a byte is ever sent to a third party. Off by default; turn on only what you want.

Break into subtasks

The favourite: a checklist from one line.

Hand a big, vague task the spark and Sempa proposes a few concrete, ordered steps. Add them all, edit them, or dismiss them — the original task is never touched unless you choose to.

Because it runs on your own model, there's no API key, no account and no per-use cost — and if the model isn't running, the spark simply doesn't appear.

  • Suggest-only — nothing changes until you approve it
  • Ordered, concrete steps you can keep or rewrite
  • Fully local · works offline · no third party
Plan the product launch Break up
Suggested subtasks on your server
Draft the announcement post
Brief the support team
Schedule social & email
Prepare the changelog
Add all Edit Generated locally

Optional

Off by default. Nothing runs until you switch it on — during install or in Settings — and each feature has its own toggle.

Private

No data ever leaves your infrastructure. No third parties, no API keys, no telemetry — ever.

Local

Runs on a small model (Ollama) you host yourself — no usage costs, no rate limits, works offline.

Seven more ways it can help — each one optional.

Import a recipe or article

Give it a link or paste some text and it becomes a task with ordered steps as sub-tasks and a checklist of items — into an editable preview before anything is saved. Recipes are read directly; the rest goes through your local model.

Natural-language quick add

Type “lunch with Sam thu 1pm 30m #personal” and it fills in the title, date, time, estimate and tags.

Suggest tags

Recommends tags drawn only from your existing set, so your taxonomy stays clean and consistent.

Title cleanup & summary

Tidies imported email and Jira subjects into concise, action-oriented titles with a rough estimate.

Plan my day

Suggests a focused order for today's tasks around your calendar events — applied only when you click.

Draft weekly review

Drafts your wins, challenges and next focus from the week's completed work — you edit before saving.

Reflection prompts

Offers a couple of context-aware end-of-day questions based on what you did and didn't finish.

All can be turned off

One switch each. Or one switch for everything.

Every feature above is an independent toggle in Settings → Integrations → AI. Turn off the ones you don't want and they disappear from the app entirely; turn the whole assistant off and Sempa behaves exactly as it did before.

You also manage the model yourself — see what's downloaded and its size, switch models, pull a new one with a live progress bar, or remove one to reclaim disk. The default is small and CPU-friendly.

Read the AI docs →
AI features
Import from URL or text
Natural-language quick add
Break into subtasks
Suggest tags
Title cleanup & summary
Plan my day
Draft weekly review
Reflection prompts
The small pieces

Details you'll feel
more than notice.

Every component is drawn to be calm and legible — and they all re-skin instantly with your chosen theme.

Tasks & sub-tasks

Notes, due dates, time estimates, colour-coded tags, sub-task checklists and file attachments.

urgentwritingadmin

Link previews

Paste a URL into notes and it renders as a tidy chip — title, site and thumbnail — instead of a raw link.

Local-first sync

Work offline; changes queue and reconcile automatically. A quiet indicator tells you where things stand.

All changes synced

At home on your phone

Swipe a task left to push it to tomorrow, long-press the app icon for New task / Plan day / Shutdown, and share a link or text from any app straight into Sempa as a task.

Recurring, timezone-aware

Daily, weekly and monthly templates that roll over on your home timezone. Task times float, so they never shift when you travel — and Sempa offers to adjust when it notices you're away.

For the keyboard-driven

Move without the mouse.

A command palette jumps you anywhere and runs any action — press K (or CtrlK), start typing, and hit enter. Anything it doesn't recognise falls through to search.

Command paletteK
Import with AI⌘⇧I
New task (day view)n
Edit hovered taske
Go to todayt
Previous / next weekjk
Show shortcuts?
Close dialogEsc

Make it yours.

Install Sempa on your server, or browse the docs to learn how each piece fits together.