A place to put the mental load down.
The remembering, the anticipating, the noticing that the school shoes are getting tight. It’s real work, it’s invisible, and this is somewhere to set it down.
You’re already running the household in your head.
A planner should reduce what you have to hold, not become one more system to maintain. Fewer decisions, less structure to keep up, a deliberately small daily surface.
Read on
The mental load is the cognitive and organisational labour of running a life: knowing what needs doing, when, for whom, and holding all of it continuously in the background. It isn’t the doing. It’s the remembering that it needs doing, and the noticing before anyone else has to ask.
It’s disproportionately carried by women, it rarely appears on anyone’s list of chores, and it doesn’t clock off. The instinctive fix is a better system: more lists, more tags, more colour-coded categories. But every system you build is another thing to maintain, and maintenance is itself mental load. Dune Seven takes the opposite position.
Get it out of your head, immediately.
Capture exists for the thought that arrives mid-shower, mid-meeting, mid-sentence. Two taps and it’s out of your working memory and somewhere you trust.
Read on
Shopping on one tab, notes on the other, the Journal for what isn’t a task at all. You sort it later, when sorting is cheap. All of it free, with no cap.
Three things, not everything.
Each morning Dune Seven asks one question: what matters most today? You name up to three. The rest still exists, still safe, just not shouting.
Read on
Today at a glance lays your timed commitments across one calm strip, so you can finally see the shape of the day and where the open space really is. Repeating routines hold the load-bearing rhythms once, so you stop re-remembering them. Visibility without the mental labour. That’s the whole design goal.
When executive dysfunction is part of it.
Mental load and executive dysfunction compound each other badly. When working memory is already unreliable, holding a running household index is exhausting in a way that is hard to explain.
Read on
Dune Seven’s energy modes and I’m Stuck were built for exactly that overlap. On a Low day the home screen quiets down to what you can face. When a task has become a wall, I’m Stuck breaks it into three to five steps you can start.
Mental load questions.
Isn’t this just another app to maintain?
That’s the risk with most of them, and it’s the thing Dune Seven is designed against. There are no projects to configure, no tags to invent and no folder structures. Capture a thought in two taps, name three priorities a day, and that’s the whole system.
Can my partner see what I’m carrying?
A shared-visibility feature is planned so the people you live with can see where you’re at without you having to find the energy to explain. Your Journal, reflections and habits are never included, no matter what.
Is it only for mothers?
No. Mental load falls heavily on mothers and on women generally, but it lands on anyone who has become the default rememberer for a household, a team or a family.
What does it cost?
There’s a permanently free tier with no card required. Pro is A$69.99 a year or A$12.99 a month, and Lifetime is a single A$129.99.
★★★★★
“Finally I’ve found an app that is free but also targets exactly how my brain functions.”
App Store review, September 2026
Also read.
- ADHD and executive dysfunctionPlanning paralysis, time blindness, task initiation. Designed around them, not in spite of them.
- Burnout and overwhelmFor when the to-do list itself has become the thing you can’t face.
- PostpartumBuilt out of a real postpartum experience. Plan for where you actually are.
- Shift work and rostersYour week doesn’t start on Monday. Built by shift workers, so it doesn’t here either.
Set it down somewhere you trust.
Free, forever. Nothing you write is ever deleted or held back from you.