Lotti

Lotti is a logbook for the work you actually did. Tasks, tracked time, voice notes, journal entries, habits and health data, in a database on your own phone.

I have tracked around 11,000 hours of my own work in it since 2022. It is open source under GPL-3.0 and has been in development since 2016.

WHAT IS DIFFERENT ABOUT IT

Intent and reality stay apart. A task describes an outcome you want. A time record describes what actually happened, with the notes, photos, recordings and measurements that explain it attached to it. Most tools flatten the two into one list and then ask you to pretend the day went to plan.

Talk instead of typing. Record audio anywhere in the app. Transcription runs on the phone with Whisper or Voxtral, in 99 languages, or through a cloud provider if you would rather. A rambling voice note comes back as a task with a checklist.

Assistants that propose, never decide. Give a task a persistent agent that reads what you record, keeps the mess summarised and suggests the next change. Every suggestion waits for you to confirm or dismiss it. That is enforced by where things are stored, not by careful prompting: agent output lives in a separate database and reaches your records only through a path that asks you first.

Nothing is collected. No telemetry, no analytics, no account, nothing uploaded to me. Your entries are an ordinary SQLite database on your device with attachments beside it. Sync between your own devices is end-to-end encrypted over Matrix, and the relay in the middle only ever holds ciphertext.

You pick the brain. Lotti has no AI backend of its own. Every call goes to a provider you set up with your own key, chosen per category of your life, so work can go to a cloud model while a journal stays on a local one. It works with OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Mistral, Ollama or any OpenAI-compatible endpoint, and onboarding points at a European route for anyone who wants one. The usage view shows tokens and requests for every call, plus cost, energy and CO2e wherever the provider reports them.

Or switch all of it off. With no provider configured at all, Lotti is still a complete task manager, time tracker and journal.

IN THE APP

- Tasks with checklists, estimates, priorities, due dates, labels and linked context
- Time tracking recorded against the plan rather than instead of it, with focus ratings
- Audio recording with on-device transcription
- Notes, photos, measurements and surveys, attached to the work they belong to
- Habits, with success, fail and skip
- Health and fitness data imported from Apple Health and other sources
- Categories and labels to draw the boundaries your decisions actually use
- Time analysis across categories, habits and measurements
- End-to-end encrypted sync with your other devices
- Also runs on iOS, macOS, Linux and Windows

TRY IT WITHOUT PUTTING ANYTHING REAL IN IT

Tap "Explore with sample data" on the welcome screen and you land in Intergalactic Penguin Logistics: a populated demo world in its own sandbox, with linked tasks, logged time, and habits carrying four imperfect weeks behind them. Nothing syncs and nothing touches your real journal. Leaving offers to copy over anything you want to keep.

WORTH KNOWING BEFORE YOU START

The design system is partway through a rollout, so some screens are more finished than others, and the agent layer is young and still changing.

There is no server-side backup and no account recovery, because no server holds a readable copy of your data. Pair a second device early, and keep an ordinary backup as well.

Capture, task management, time tracking, voice transcription and the task agent are free. More advanced agents may become in-app purchases later.

Source code, the manual in 11 languages, and the privacy policy: github.com/matthiasn/lotti