The research behind Monjour

Step 1

Give each plan a time

Every plan is an event with a time, in your Apple Calendar. Reminders without a time wait in Quick Schedule. Drag each one onto your day.

Deciding exactly when you will act is called an implementation intention. It is one of the most tested tools in psychology. Across 94 tests, it had a medium-to-large effect on reaching goals (Gollwitzer & Sheeran, 2006), and a 2025 update of 642 tests found it helps actions, thoughts and feelings (Sheeran et al., 2025). In a field trial with 3,272 employees, a prompt to write down the date and time of a flu shot raised vaccination rates. A prompt to write down the date alone made no reliable difference (Milkman et al., 2011).

A plan also clears your head. An unfinished goal keeps intruding on other work, but people who made a specific plan for it stopped being distracted by it (Masicampo & Baumeister, 2011).

Step 2

Focus on one task

When the event's alert rings, tap the event, then Focus. The session stays on your Lock Screen and in the Dynamic Island, and logs itself when you stop.

The focus session completes the plan. An implementation intention works because it links an action to a cue: when the time comes, you act, without having to decide again (Gollwitzer & Sheeran, 2006). In Monjour, the planned time is the cue, the alert announces it, and one tap starts the work.

One task at a time is cheaper than several. Every switch between tasks costs time and accuracy (Monsell, 2003), and an unfinished task keeps a hold on your attention after you leave it (Leroy, 2009). The session keeps your one chosen task on screen, with a timer and a ring for the planned time, so the way back is always one glance away. Watching your progress as you go also helps you reach the goal (Harkin et al., 2016).

When something does pull you away, tap Notes on the Lock Screen and write where you stopped. People who made this kind of "ready-to-resume" plan before a switch let go of the old task and did better on the new one (Leroy & Glomb, 2018).

Step 3

Log what happened, and how it went

When an event went as planned, tap it, then Log time. To add an entry later, hold in the journal lane. One or two broad tags are enough. Every entry has notes for how it went.

Recording is not paperwork. It is the intervention. A meta-analysis of 138 randomized studies with 19,951 people found that monitoring your progress helps you reach your goals. The effect was larger when people physically recorded their progress than when they only noticed it (Harkin et al., 2016).

The notes matter as much as the hours. In the first expressive-writing study, students who wrote about their thoughts and feelings for four days visited the health center less often over the next six months (Pennebaker & Beall, 1986). Later trials measured the body. Writers had stronger antibody responses to a hepatitis B vaccine (Petrie et al., 1995), and their wounds healed faster. In one trial with adults aged 64 to 97, 76% of the writers' wounds had healed by day 11, against 42% in the control group (Koschwanez et al., 2013). In both wound trials, the control groups wrote a plain account of their day or their time management, and did not get the benefit (Weinman et al., 2008). The benefit comes from writing how it went, not only what you did. A meta-analysis of 146 randomized trials confirms the effect across health and mood (Frattaroli, 2006).

Notes can look forward too. Writing about your best possible future raised wellbeing, and months later came with fewer illness visits (King, 2001). Across 29 studies, this exercise improved wellbeing, optimism and positive feelings (Carrillo et al., 2019).

Step 4

Review your time

Analytics mode, in the menu, totals your hours by tag for any day, month or year. Sleep and workouts come in from Apple Health. You can also connect Claude or ChatGPT in Settings > Premium and ask about your week.

Memory is a poor record of time. Across 106 comparisons, people's reports of their own screen time rarely matched the logs (Parry et al., 2021). In a study of 669 adults with wrist sensors, people reported 6.8 hours of sleep but slept 6 (Lauderdale et al., 2008). Monjour replaces the memory with the record.

That record makes your next plan better. People underestimate how long their tasks will take, because they plan from hope and ignore their past. When they connected the new task to past ones, the bias disappeared (Buehler et al., 1994), and people who saw how long a task really took predicted the next one more accurately (Roy et al., 2008). In Monjour, last week sits on the same timeline as next week.

There are no streaks. Missing a day did not slow down how a habit formed (Lally et al., 2010), but seeing a broken streak made people less likely to continue (Silverman & Barasch, 2023). In Monjour, a missed day is one data point, and you can log it late. The aim is a clear view of your time, not more output: good time management is linked more strongly to wellbeing than to performance (Aeon et al., 2021).

A structured look back is how pilots, surgeons and soldiers get better. Debriefs improved performance by about 25% across 46 samples, for individuals as much as for teams (Tannenbaum & Cerasoli, 2013). They worked best when they used an objective record of what happened (Keiser & Arthur, 2021). Your journal is that record. What you learn from it goes into your next plan, which brings you back to step 1.