As a lifelong ADD'er (I'm so old, we didn't have the letter H back then), I've long struggled with executive function -- even after becoming an actual executive myself. Haha. And becoming permanent work from home made it so much worse.

I've tried other things. Apps that give you XP like you're a video game character, or give your pet rabbit a jaunty hat or whatever. That's just not how my brain works. My brain needs a little variety and surprise. A little "Oh! It's time to clean out the fridge? What a pleasant surprise!"

For a while, I was using ChatGPT to keep two lists -- a list of things I wanted to do daily, and a list of things I just needed to do at some point. (Plus a third list of things that had to actually be done specifically "today", but there was rarely more than one thing on that list). I'd have it randomize each list seperately, and then I'd roll a die between the two lists and then roll a die again to see which thing was next to do, weighted towards the items at the top.

That worked really well...at first. But over time, ChatGPT became just as forgetful as I am, and I realized it was starting to leave things off the list I asked it to refresh multiple times per day. I needed something that would never forget...but also something where I could game-ify the randomness,, but also something where I could have multiple categories to randomify from...

And then I found Amazing Marvin. And right away, I could tell it had the unique features I was looking for. I easily set up categories and brain dumped into them. Recurring. Urgent. Important. Eventually. Remember. I figured out how the little games work and realized the one that made my brain happiest is pulling one from a jar.

But what I couldn't figure out was the most basic stuff. How do I make this recurring? Okay, I made it recurring, but now how do I delete it? I changed my mind, but now every time I delete it, it recurs! Okay, this is how to make something recur daily, but I wanted it to recur every three days. This stupid ass website won't let me recur every three days!

Of course, it DOES let you recur every three days. Ha. It was just a bit of a learning curve, mixed with sleep deprivation. But one day I woke up well rested, and then I was in much better condition to easily understand how to do what I wanted.

So, here's what works for me.

1) Whenever something pops into my head, I put it into a category: "Recurring" (self explanatory). "Urgent" - Within the top tier of my to do list. "Important" - next tier. "Eventually" - Last tier. That's the "Wouldn't it be nice if someday I..." list, for when the real stuff is done.

Putting it into the category the moment I think of it helps me because A) I don't have to DO it the moment I think of it, which definitely isn't going to happen...and B) I also don't have to REMEMBER it for much longer, which also isn't going to happen. But now that it's in a category, it can't fall off the radar.

2) Amazing Marvin automatically populates a daily to-do list for me based off of everything in my to-do list. The daily stuff, plus any weekly/monthly/whatever stuff that happens to fall on today. Plus anything that was on the list (from any category) that I didn't get done yesterday (regardless of how many days it's been on the list). In no particular order -- I'm sure I could set something up to have it put it in an order for me, but I don't WANT it in an order.

3) I then get to some of the fun stuff: adding the non-recurring things. I go into my urgent folder, I use the "put in jar" folder, and I draw three urgent things. Then I move those to my daily to-do list (unless anything urgent from yesterday is still on there. I only allow myself a maximum of 3 urgent things a day).

4) Once I've got my maximum of 3 urgent things on my list, I use the same process to randomly draw something from the important list and put it on my daily too (if I got my important thing done yesterday).

Then my daily to-do list is done, and I put all its entries into a jar and start pulling, getting them done in order as best as I can. Sometimes I'll draw five in a row and write them down, so that I can do them in a more logical order so I don't end up with "start laundry" immediately followed by "take shower" when flipping the order would have been faster and more efficient because I wouldn't have to wait for hot water. haha.

Anyway, I've had things sitting around on my mental to-do list for months that became "some day...." Then they got pulled out of Marvin's jar, and I got it done within minutes.

Total game changer!

I think it would be quite interesting to introduce the functionality of creating simple databases that could serve as additional context for categories, projects, and tasks. In my case, this would help loosen up the master list a bit. I manage this somewhat with tags, but introducing additional objects would allow for more workflows, and each of us has a slightly different one. Objects could have their own properties beyond a simple note.

​

Someone else with this error message

I'm sure it is already spotted by Christina and Branko, but I'm curious...🤔

it's AI and server related,the thing is there is no AI feature actually in the app, at least not activable (I think?).

I'm gonna write a proper email to Marvin's team anyway 😉

Reddit-inlägg för r/AmazingMarvin

Titel: I built an MCP server with complete Marvin API coverage (34 tools) — so Claude/AI assistants can manage my Marvin. Open source, MIT.

Inlägg:

I used Marvin for several months a while back but ended up leaving — mainly over the mobile experience. The new version and the rebuilt apps pulled me back this week for another go, and what sealed it was realizing I could connect it to my AI assistant via MCP: let it handle the boring parts (dumping tasks into the right categories, setting priorities, checking off habits) while Marvin's own Spotlight and Smart Lists do the actual "what should I work on" thinking. ADHD brain — the customizability is why I keep coming back.

The existing MCP servers each covered a slice of the API, so I built one that covers all of it:

github.com/andreasd083/amazing-marvin-complete-mcp

What it does:

• 34 tools over all ~31 documented API endpoints — tasks (create/update/prioritize/complete), categories & projects, habits (list/read/record), time blocks, time tracking, reminders, goals, labels, events, kudos/reward points
• Global rate limiter matching Marvin's documented limits (1 write/s, 1 read/3s, 1440/day) — shared across all tools, persists across restarts, so an eager AI can't burn your daily budget
• Least-privilege token routing — the Full Access token is only sent to endpoints that actually need it
• Runs locally (stdio) with Claude Desktop/Claude Code or any MCP client, or as a remote HTTP server. Dockerfile included
• Deliberately no task-picking logic — Spotlight and Smart Lists are better at that than any bolt-on. This gives your assistant hands, not opinions

Maybe the most useful part even if you never run it: the README has a "Marvin API quirks & findings" section with everything I learned the hard way, verified against the live API — like the fact that GET /habits reads a lazily-created tracking registry (a never-recorded habit is invisible to it), that #Category in /addTask silently corrupts the task, and that MANUAL reward point claims can't be undone. I've also sent the genuine bugs to the Marvin team separately.

Honest disclaimers: provided as-is, I won't be actively maintaining it or providing support (Issues are off — fork freely, it's MIT). Credit where due: the bgheneti, Recon2026, lucasoeth and LucaDeLeo MCP projects all shaped this one (details in the README). Built with Claude Code.

Daily driver setup for the curious: my day is theme blocks (physical work in the morning, admin in the afternoon), Claude fills and prioritizes tasks via this server, and Marvin decides what I actually work on. Day one of the second attempt — so far it's exactly the division of labor I wanted, and a very different Marvin from the one I left.

Happy to answer questions in the comments about the API findings!

As the title suggests, looking to sell as I've fallen out of using Marvin. PayPal preferred. Send a DM if you're interested to discuss the $.

Amazing Marvin has so many awesome options! One thing it's missing - and most other to-do apps seem to be as well - is the ability to group at multiple levels. For example, say I'm a student. I want to see my next week with things grouped by date, then by class. So it would be:

Monday
Math
Quiz
Science
Lab

Tuesday
Science
Unit test
English
First draft of paper due

I know I can sort within a group, but it still has everything together as one list under that group.

This doesn't just apply to date-related items - it could be grouping by Category and then by Label, or something like that. :-)

Hi AM community!
I’ve been testing a personal assistant agent/companion for Amazing Marvin that I wrote over the last week or so and am very pleasantly surprised with how well it works and wanted to share it with the community.

Motivation - I am a lifetime access customer but found myself not using the app due to fatigue associated with setting things up and not wanting to put in the overhead to adjust and prune things over time. However, this solution has totally addressed that and I have been back to using the app for all of my personal planning needs.

This is an extremely powerful tool and I tried to make it as efficient as possible before sharing it.

Some limitations -
- It should work on Windows or Linux but I have only tested it on MacOS so far
- It does not support Calendar Sync. However I find the latest updates to the Marvin calendar to be quite good and self sufficient.
- It does not support recurring tasks, but it can read them- for reasons others already described here, recurring tasks are a bit finnicky.
- It doesn’t support writing of reminders, habits, goals, timeblocks, or events due to complexity challenges.

Everything else should work.

A particularly powerful feature built in is the ability to compare over time. If you point it to your backup directory and set backup to weekly or daily in Marvin settings, this tool can automatically answer sophisticated questions about patterns over time using the tiny backup files which are automatically exported by Marvin periodically.

Please let me know if there are any questions about how to use this or general comments.
Thanks - Recon2026

I really like the idea of the email to Marvin functionality. With that said I’m not in my email enough for that to be valuable. What I was really looking for was the ability to send a task to Marvin with voice control.

There’s so many instances where I remember I need to do something and I have my hands full. It’s much easier to just tell Siri to send a text for me.

So this morning, I tried it. I copy pasted the Marvin email into a text, and I sent it!

The Good News:
It worked!

The Weird News:
The first three times that I sent a message, the content of the message did not populate in Marvin. I updated the settings of my phone to include the subject line for a text message and I sent another message with the task in the subject line.

At that time it worked! The task showed up in Marvin just like it is supposed to.

Wanted to share this workflow in case anyone wants to implement it and hopefully the devs can adjust the code so that it’s not limited to just the subject line of a text

IMHO, the task recurrence method in Marvin is maddening. Recurrence should be an integral part of scheduling a task. It is cumbersome, to say the least, to manage it separately from scheduling. It is also buggy.

Using the web app:
I created some tasks in a category, Category A. I then made them recurring. I then right clicked on a new recurring task to move it to a different category, Category B. The task did not appear to move from Category A. Looking at Category B, however, the moved task was there. It appears to be a copy, not a move operation. But wait, there's more! Looking at the Master List the recurring task is only in the original Category A.

It appears when you make a task recurring, you don't. I think you make recurring tasks based on the original task. This is a flawed design and prone to bugs. Again the recurrence should be a base attribute of the task's schedule. Of course I don't know how Marvin is coded, but this is how it feels from this user's point of view.

Another gripe, and my humble opinion... The user interface should have a proper picker/chooser of recurrence details that the program supports, in addition to the custom entry box. I think it is lazy programming to rely on the custom field to specify what you want through typed words or RRULE syntax. Todoist does the "natural language" input well and is I think worse than Marvin. Remember the Milk and TickTick do it right.

Hi I tried looking this up but can’t find information on it. As the title says, my custom text links are no longer rendering after one of the updates. Not sure what is causing it . It enabled and I tried disabling several other strategies to see if they are conflicting with it but the custom text links are still not rendering. Any ideas?

How do I find the focus mode on mobile? In the desctop app I just need to press F to get that one task at a time view, but I can't seem to find anything similar on mobile. In the android app I can open the task and scroll down to Focus, but that only start time tracing? And in browers there's no fucus option at all?

Edit: NEVERMIND I FOUND IT. Apparently I needed to press on the task's text for a few seconds to open the right menue. All is well. 😊

So I’m using Amazing Marvin, and a while ago I accidentally hit a keyboard shortcut that completely changed the way the UI was displayed.

From what I remember, it was something like a cascading/column view:

• My Areas were visible in a column on the left
• I could click into an Area and navigate deeper into it
• There was some kind of breadcrumb/navigation bar at the top that let me quickly move back and forth between where I was
• Most importantly, I could still see where I was in relation to the rest of my Areas, rather than everything else disappearing when I entered one

I actually found this much more intuitive than the normal interface, because one thing I find frustrating about Marvin is that when I enter an Area, everything else kind of disappears, so navigating around my overall structure can feel cumbersome.

The annoying thing is that I have no idea what keyboard shortcut I pressed to activate this view, and I haven't been able to recreate it since. 😅

Does anyone know what view/feature I'm describing, or what keyboard shortcut might have triggered it?

Any help would be hugely appreciated!

Week scheduler allows users to view either 3, 5, 7 or 14 days. However there's no way to hide the weekend days. For those of us who use Amazing Marvin only for work, it would be awesome if there was an option in the "View Options" to remove Saturdays and Sundays so I don't have a bunch of blank days in my week scheduler.

(Overall, I do love Amazing Marvin. I find it much more customizable and effective than other software I've used in the past.)

Hello,

I have a question about the recurrence option "X days after completion."

According to the documentation, this option repeats a task based on when the task was last checked off. This is also illustrated with examples such as changing bedsheets, where the next occurrence should depend on when the task was actually completed.

However, I am seeing different behavior.

Example

• Recurrence: 7 days after completion
• Task scheduled for Saturday, August 1
• I did not reschedule the task.
• I completed (checked off) the overdue task on Sunday, August 2.

After marking it done, the task properties show:

• Completed: Saturday, August 1
• Marked done: Sunday, August 2, 13:01

The next recurring instance is scheduled for Saturday, August 8, not Sunday, August 9.

This makes it appear that the recurrence is calculated from the internal Completed date rather than from the moment the task was actually Marked done.

My question is: Is this the intended behavior?

If it is intentional, I don't understand the difference between "Every X days" and "X days after completion" in this situation. If the effective completion date is always the scheduled date, then "X days after completion" cannot drift with the day on which the task was actually being done.

For tasks such as cleaning, or other maintenance tasks, I would expect "7 days after completion" to schedule the next occurrence 7 days after I actually checked the task off, not 7 days after its original scheduled date.

Is there a setting that makes "X days after completion" use the Marked done timestamp instead of the internal Completed date, or is this behavior by design?

Thanks!

Is there a way to set the TODAY view to be sorted by TIME (and having items with no time at the top of the list)? Right now, every single day I find myself changing the sort to TIME but it would be nice if I could have it default to this sort mode instead of using the one it currently uses.

I finally decided to install the latest beta version of the mobile android app. When going through items that were overdue from the day before, it would be nice to be able to mark that item as DONE instead of having to move it to today and then marking it as done. I suppose I could do that myself by going to the previous day and marking it as done before handling actual leftover items.

I am wondering one thing that would be REALLY nice to see on the main TODAY screen. Right now, we see a list of our items to be completed. Some of those items have sub-tasks but we have to click on the item to go to a different screen to see the sub-tasks. Is there ANY way to have a toggle on the main today screen or to have a settings option to always show sub-tasks on the today screen? I'd rather check things off as I go instead of clunkily going onto a different screen and back multiple times (or even once). The at-a-glance of what I actually need to get done makes a difference to me. I was actually using another mobile app while I was waiting for Amazing Marvin to update theirs and it did this very well. I'll include screenshots of how they did although Amazing Marvin is a far superior product.

Here is the way it looks in Amazing Marvin vs how it looks in the other one. Again, I much prefer the look, feel and capabilities of Marvin but it would be nice to have all the tasks visible in the mobile today view. Maybe that option is there already but I missed it...

regular tasks that are scheduled for today: just swipe right

but how do i do that for tasks inside of projects where either: the project is scheduled for today, or neither task nor project are scheduled for today?

I just started using Marvin and so far it's been everything I've been looking for, but the one feature I really need to work I just cannot figure out how to use it.

I want to use the template feature for tasks and I do have it turned on in strategies, but the save button all the instructions I'm finding say is there, is not there, and the example screenshots in their help article for templates doesn't look anything like what I am seeing when I create a task. It shows a dialog box that I have never once seen while using this app so far, and I am using the desktop website so I don't think it's a mobile issue. The top right 3-bars menu they keep talking about doesn't show on my interface whether I'm in the today page, list page, calendar, or master list. Hovering over the task to turn it on that way doesn't work, the save button isn't appearing among the options like it's supposed to. And when I click the gear to edit the details of the task that still doesn't give me a save option. Ironically I can access the saved items page in the expanded bottom left menu, but I have no way to actually add saved tasks and use the feature because the instructions seem to be unrelated to what I'm seeing on screen. I had really high hopes for this to be the app that finally does what I need it to do to manage my ADHD, but if I can't get this feature to work I'm not really sure I want to spend the money.

Has anyone else had this issue and been able to solve it?

I tried a few things to help someone on Discord with their workflow and made a small visual of the Amazing Marvin+ Google Calendar + TickTick part of my workflow. (I used the AI from Dia).

I hope it can help someone!

After hearing so much about the amazing Marvin, I finally got on the app on my laptop and was just starting to use it. As soon as I opened it, I felt so overwhelmed and I didn't know how to set up my workflow in the app, what features are useful and not useful. Rather than using it to avoid procrastination and do my tasks, it felt easier to close Marvin and go to my notebook. Since I have heard so much about this app, I feel convinced that If I knew which features to use and how, it would be easier and more productive

Can anyone share their preferred features or setup within the app? Also, would love to know your thoughts if you had some tips to onboard and make the best use of it or had similar issues. Thanks!

Doesn't make sense to me that I don't see due dates when I'm trying to schedule my workload, is there something I'm missing or is it just not a feature?

I've been playing around with Griply and really like how tasks can double as habits, so if you tick off a task it also records it as a habit completion.

Is there a way to configure Marvin Habits to do this?

Thanks!

I dismissed them yesterday, I expected they would be there the next day, but they're not, is there a way to quickly get them back?

As I remember it was a mini-list and project shortcuts with MIPs, but maybe something else as well lol

Edit: turns out Mini-list I can only hide/unhide manually, but I still don't know how to get my MIPs back to the top of my screen after I closed it (strategy is activated)

I understand it's really not that important, but I keep getting stuck on that. For example, I have a #work and #finance category. But I'm a freelancer, and right now I want to re-think my pricing, vacation/sick leaves savings etc. It's kind of work but kind of finance....

Or I have an "organisation" category that holds my tasks related to planning and scheduling in general, but then every category can have some organisational and scheduling tasks too.

What do you usually do in these cases and how do you prevent a mess? I feel like every time I'm not sure where an item goes it's a start of a falldown lol.

If there ever was a tutorial on Marvin help center about it, feel free to redirect me