Sioul
Sioul [siwl] is Breton for calm, peaceful, silent.
Most software expects people to adapt to it. Sioul adapts the demands of the world to the person.
Modern admin assumes someone always available and always at full strength. Sioul starts instead from what you can give today, your attention, your energy, your health and your rest, and fits work, institutions and money around it.
Try it: version 0.0.9 for Linux, Windows, macOS and Android; it is young and changes often (install).
A letter from the tax office, the task it asks for, the appointment, the document, the person who sent it and the payment all belong to one matter. You do not have to keep their relationships in your head: Sioul keeps them.
Sioul is a personal administrative environment. It gathers what modern life scatters across mailboxes, websites, calendars, task lists, folders and banks, and brings forward only what belongs in your attention now. It is free software, and it runs on your own devices.
It is not a productivity app. It does not try to make you do more, answer faster or keep up with everything: it tries to make admin ask less of you. It is designed as an act of care.
It is made for the people who need it most, from research rather than taste. Sioul is designed for the people for whom admin costs most, whose energy or thinking is limited or changes from day to day: neurodivergent people, including autistic people and people with ADHD; people affected by PTSD or the effects of trauma; people living with anxiety, depression or burnout; with ME/CFS (chronic fatigue syndrome), long COVID or another illness that limits energy or thinking; with an eating disorder; and everyone who knows admin anxiety, the dread that a letter, a form or a call from an office can bring: ADHD makes admin harder to start and to keep track of, PTSD can turn an office's demands into a reminder of harm, and the two often come together. Its design is trauma-informed: safety, predictability and choice come first, nothing surprises or blames you, and everything can be undone. Its design decisions are grounded in published research: for each one, the notes say what the studies found, how strong their evidence is, and what that evidence led Sioul to build or to refuse (what the research says).
Website and user guide: sioul.aurelienpierre.com
You decide what gets through
The world does not get direct access to your attention. Mail, calls, messages from other apps, the websites you keep, reminders and doses all pass through the same rules, and you set them. Each kind of time in your day has rules of its own: work, your admin, leisure, meals, sleep, and the free time or the pause you take at the press of a button.
Some things come at once: the code you just asked a website for, a dose, a call from someone you chose. Some wait for their time: a client's mail waits for your working hours, the tax office's for your admin hours, and nobody's work reaches your evening. Some are shown where you look, on the Porch or on your phone's home screen, without a notification. Some never reach you, such as the senders you blocked. Being shown is not being interrupted: only what you allowed may interrupt you.
Most software lets each app decide when it may interrupt you. Sioul turns that around: you set the rules once, and they hold for your mail, calls, messages, sites and reminders, on your computer and on your phone: what reaches you, and when.
Your devices follow your boundaries. Your computer and your phone are two ways into the same rules, carried between them sealed by your own sync app. Do-not-disturb is one switch for every device: turned on at your computer, it holds on your phone, usually within minutes, and the other way round; a pause and Free time travel the same way. On an Android phone, Sioul screens calls by the same rules: a call from someone who may not reach you now goes to your voicemail, and the Porch tells you later who called. Sioul never answers a call and never listens. When you expect one, a click on any of your devices lets every call ring for an hour.
A filter that learns what can wait. Most spam filters keep an inbox tidy; Sioul's protects your attention. It learns from your own mail, on each of your devices, your phone too, when you ask and then by itself once a week while that device charges and is idle; what it learns stays on that device, and travels, sealed, only to a device of yours that does not learn. It judges strangers' mail only, and what looks like spam, or might be, waits in a folded queue on the Porch, without a count or a notification. Until you choose what it does with each verdict, it moves nothing.
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