Set 4 is in TestFlight now, and it is far and away the largest update the app has had. Rather than list forty things, I want to explain the three problems it goes after, because they are the three ways a plan stops being useful to an ADHD brain.

A plan fails when it isn’t with you. It fails when it’s lying to you. And it fails when using it costs more effort than ignoring it. Set 4 is one release aimed at all three.

1. The plan follows you

Set on Apple Watch

The headline. Set 4 adds a proper standalone watch app: today’s timeline in order, priority colours down the side, the next task tinted, overdue start times in red, and your estimated finish time under the list behind a checkered flag.

The important word is standalone. It syncs through iCloud on its own rather than waiting for your phone to hand it anything, so your plan is on your wrist with your iPhone in another room, switched off, or dead. Only the timer controls need the phone nearby, and the timer keeps counting on the watch either way.

Why this matters more for ADHD than it sounds: the gap between “I want to know what’s next” and “I know what’s next” is where the phone comes out, and the phone is a slot machine. Checking your wrist is a two-second glance that cannot become forty minutes of Instagram. Removing the phone from the loop removes the most reliable derailment in the entire system.

You can tap a task to complete it, reschedule your whole remaining day from now, change a duration, and dictate a new task with the + button. There are two complications, in rectangular, inline and circular sizes: Next Task shows what’s next, when it starts, how many are left and when the day ends; Stats shows what you’ve done today, this week, and your current streak. The complication timeline is built from your day in advance, so the watch face keeps up without anything running.

”Add a Set task”

Set gets Siri. Say “Add a Set task” to your iPhone, Mac or watch and it joins the end of today’s plan. Set never opens, which is the entire point: the app you must open to capture a thought is the app that loses the thought. Say a duration in the sentence, like “email Sam 15m”, and Set reads it out of the text.

It’s built on App Intents, so the same capture is a Shortcuts action called Add Task. Put it on the Action button, trigger it from an automation, run it from Spotlight. English only for now.

One honest note on the phrase. “Set” is an ordinary English word, so “add a task in Set” competes with Apple’s own Reminders and often loses. “Add a Set task” is the form to learn, because “Set task” as a phrase makes it unambiguous who you’re talking to.

2. The plan tells the truth

Your calendar, inside your day

This is the change I’m happiest with, and it’s a rewrite rather than a feature.

Your meetings now appear in Today as their own rows, at their real times, in among your tasks. They are never turned into tasks. Nothing is written to Set’s database or to iCloud for them. They can’t land in your Inbox, they can’t become duplicates, and no amount of completing, deleting or reordering tasks can move or damage a real calendar event.

What that buys you is a finish time that is finally honest. Press Reschedule and your tasks flow into the gaps between your meetings rather than pretending the meetings aren’t there. Drag a task around by hand and it steps around them too. If you have three hours of calls, Set now knows you have three hours of calls.

Tapping an event opens it like a task card, so you can change its title, time, length or notes and it writes straight to your calendar. Repeating events ask whether a change applies to that one occurrence or the whole series. Swipe a finished event away, or skip a meeting that isn’t happening and watch your tasks move up into the reclaimed time, with undo if you were wrong.

I wrote more about why the usual approach to this is wrong in your calendar and your to-do list have never spoken.

When the day doesn’t fit

Star more than a day can hold and Set used to quietly run your plan into the small hours. Now it says so: the finish time turns orange with a label like “2h over”, and a banner counts the tasks starting past your day end. Tap Move and they shift onto the days ahead, filling each day up to its end before spilling into the next.

Nothing is shortened, nothing is deleted, and nothing is hidden. Over-committing becomes visible at the moment you do it, rather than at 11pm.

A countdown in the overview

Tap the Today overview and it now cycles three views rather than two: your stats, your finish time, and a new countdown showing how long is left on whatever you’re in the middle of, next to how long until your day is done. It counts and names whatever is actually current, task, break or meeting.

Time blindness is not fixed by knowing what time it is. It’s helped by knowing how much time is left, which is a different number, and one your brain will not produce on its own.

3. The plan gets out of the way

Speed

The whole list layer was rebuilt the way Apple’s own apps do it. Rows render only when they’re on screen and unchanged rows skip redrawing. Dragging moves a local order and writes once when you let go, so rows step aside while your finger is still moving. Typing commits when you finish rather than on every keystroke. The Inbox pages, at a page size you choose.

The sync engine moved off the main thread entirely and works in batches: one fetch per side per pass, one save per pass, instead of a round trip per item.

Tested against 5,000 tasks, a 2,000-reminder sync and 100 calendar events.

It opens straight away

Launch no longer waits on migrations, duplicate cleanup, notification rescheduling or calendar sync. All of that now starts after the first frame and hands the main thread back between steps.

This one is a bug fix wearing a feature’s clothes. On a large library with Reminders connected, that startup work could stall long enough for iOS to decide the app had hung and kill it. If you ever had Set freeze on launch and restart itself, that was why, and it’s gone.

Sync asks first

Before Set touches your calendar or reminders it now asks which direction to run. Import Only reads and never writes back: nothing in Apple Calendar or Apple Reminders is added, edited or deleted, ever. Two-Way keeps both matched, but only writes back things you actually changed in Set.

The setup sheet also tells you plainly what Apple doesn’t let either app carry across, rather than letting you discover it later.

Your Reminders lists can become projects with matching names and colours instead of everything landing in one Inbox pile. And deleting a project now asks what should happen to its reminders, then stops importing that list, so the project can’t rise from the dead on the next sync.

Same settings everywhere

Around 130 preferences now travel with your iCloud account: theme and colours, date format, week start, day boundaries, sounds, swipe actions, notification choices and every sync option. Which calendars and reminder lists you picked come too, matched by name so each device resolves them against its own accounts.

If you have ever set Set up twice, you’ll notice.

The rest, briefly

  • A redesigned Live Activity. Progress is a bar under the time now, not a ring. A ring is drawn by the app, and iOS freezes anything the app draws a few seconds after your screen sleeps, which is why the old one stopped dead while the clock beside it carried on. The bar keeps filling while the phone is asleep.
  • New tasks, your way. Default task length, default subtask length, and a default priority, or have priority follow whatever you last picked by hand.
  • Import a project from Markdown (Pro). Headings become stages, list items become tasks, indented items become subtasks, durations and dates are read from each line, and one undo removes the whole thing.
  • Links in notes. Select text, tap the link button, and the address slot is already waiting. With a URL on your clipboard it’s one tap.
  • The overdue alarm now repeats as often as every 5 seconds, with 17 of its own tones.
  • The icon-only and minimal tab bars are free now, and icon-only is the new default. Set Pro also works with Family Sharing, so one subscription covers the household.
  • The Mac gets its own guided tour, and finally runs first-run setup, which it never did.

When

Set 4 is in TestFlight and will be on the App Store soon. It’s a free update, and it needs iOS 18.4, macOS 15.0 or watchOS 11.0.

The full list is on the changelog, and the documentation has already been updated for it, including new pages for Apple Watch, Siri and Shortcuts and Calendar and Reminders sync.

If you’re new here: Set is a task manager that turns your list into a timeline, so you can see when your day actually ends. It’s free to try.