The idea, applied to your day
If you've searched for a Dynamic Island for Mac, you probably have the iPhone's version in mind: a small black shape at the top of the screen that changes with what you're doing. Tidy Day takes that idea and gives it a single job. It keeps your day in a small black island at the top center of your Mac's screen.
It's worth being direct about what that means. Tidy Day is a daily planner. The island shows your tasks, your progress and your focus timer, and nothing else. It isn't a general-purpose control center for your Mac.
Three things the closed island can show
Closed, the island shows one thing at a time, so you can read it at a glance:
- Today's progress. A count like 3/5, with a small ring that fills as you finish tasks.
- Your next task. Choose When closed, show: Next task in Settings and the island names what's next instead of counting.
- A running focus timer. Start a focus session and the island shows the task and the time, like ● Record demo · 24:18.
The first two are a preference you set once. The third appears when you start a focus session, so the thing you're working on right now is the thing at the top of the screen.
How it opens
Move the pointer onto the island and it opens into the full panel: the date and a heading, a thin progress bar, a week strip and the selected day's tasks. Move the pointer away and it folds back into the island.
Hovering never takes keyboard focus from the app you're in. You can check the list in the middle of a sentence and keep typing. When you do want to type in Tidy Day, click into the panel. Close it and focus goes back to the app you were using.
There are two other ways in:
- Press ⌃⌥D from any app. You can change the shortcut in Settings.
- Switch hover to click in Settings, if you'd rather the island only opens when you mean it to.
Once you're in the panel, the keyboard covers everything. ← → moves between days, N adds a task, Space completes the selected one and Esc goes back or closes. Typing a title and pressing Return adds it, and the field stays ready for the next.
A Dynamic Island for Mac, with or without a notch
On MacBooks with a notch, the island wraps around the camera housing. The strip of screen beside the camera becomes the place your day lives.
On Macs without a notch, it sits in the menu bar instead, at the top center of the screen. Either way, it works across Spaces and on external displays.
Over full-screen apps it fades away, so it isn't sitting on top of a video or a slideshow. The exception is a running focus session. Then the timer stays in view, which is usually what you want when you've gone full screen to concentrate.
When it's collapsed and idle, it does no polling and uses no CPU. It measured 0% on an Intel MacBook Pro. Tidy Day needs macOS 14 Sonoma or later and runs on Apple Silicon and Intel Macs.
A focus timer in the island
The part of Tidy Day that feels most like the iPhone's island is focus mode. You can start a session from any task: select it and press F. The open island shows the task, the time and three controls. Close the panel and the timer stays in the island while you work.
The clock runs on timestamps, so it stays right when the panel is closed, the Mac sleeps or the app relaunches. Sessions pause on their own while the Mac is asleep. In the open island, Space pauses and resumes, Return completes the task and Esc closes the panel.
The focus timer page covers session lengths and the two ways a session can end. If what you're really after is a planner that lives at the top of the screen, notch or not, the menu bar planner page goes into what you can do from there, and planning the week covers the rest of the panel.
