Sonto in 5 Minutes: Structure Without the Straitjacket

Most planning apps sit at one of two ends. Task managers are clean and fast, but for me there was never enough structure to make a goal stick — nothing nudged me to plan, think or reflect. Goal planners go the other way: set a vision, then life areas, then goals, then habits, layer after layer. There, the plan became the point, and I wasn't making progress. And life is messy — urgent things come up, and they don't fit the blueprint. Sonto is my attempt at the middle. This is a five-minute tour of the whole app. The building blocks are ones you already know: areas for the parts of your life that never finish, projects for things with a start and an end, the day, and the week. Around those sits a thin layer of guidance. Sonto nudges you when it's time to plan, walks you through it, and then gets out of the way. Even a yearly plan is a project at heart. The guidance follows one idea: to know what matters today, you need to know where you're headed. So it starts with your year — an intention you can write or skip, and goals grouped by area with an intensity score. Every quarter, thirty minutes turns those goals into milestones you can actually finish in ninety days. Every week, ten minutes decides which milestones move forward. Every morning, three minutes picks today out of the week. Your calendar sits right next to your tasks. Drag a task onto it and the time is blocked, which protects the important work and shows you straight away whether the week actually fits. The everyday basics are here too — tags to filter any view down to what you need, and repeating tasks that can find their own time on your calendar. And there's AI. AI can do a lot of the work; Sonto is where you decide what work matters. On the Mac there's a built-in MCP server, a command-line tool and a one-click connector for Claude, so your AI tools can read your plans, help you plan the week and schedule tasks. I use it for a daily briefing, weekly planning suggestions and a quarterly recap. Sonto runs natively on Mac, iPad and iPhone, with guided planning on all three. Your data syncs through your own iCloud, so it stays yours. On the Mac you can import from Apple Reminders, Todoist and Things, and export any view as Markdown, so you're never locked in. Chapters: 00:00 Busy days, goals that don't move 00:13 Two ends: task managers and goal planners 00:49 The middle: familiar building blocks 01:26 Your year: an intention and goal groups 02:06 Your quarter: goals become milestones 02:30 Your week: ten minutes on a Friday 02:47 Your day: urgent meets important 03:04 Your calendar, next to your tasks 03:25 Tags and repeating tasks 03:37 AI: MCP, the CLI and the Claude connector 04:19 Mac, iPad and iPhone — and your data 04:38 Free to try Sonto is free to try on the App Store: https://sonto.app The method behind it: https://sonto.app/method Help centre: https://help.sonto.app More on the channel: • Why Goals Fail — and It Isn't Motivation:    • Why Goals Fail — and It Isn't Motivation   • The Planning Method That Connects Your Year to Your Day:    • The Planning Method That Connects Your Yea...   Thanks for watching. — Bastiaan