equanimi.tech

Zenborg

A garden for your attention

Plant what you want to grow, with the people and places you care about. Cultivate it every day: tend what matters, fence out the weeds. Harvest what it teaches you, and tune the next season.

"What will I tend to today?"

macOS · Apple Silicon · local-first · Get it

Works on its own. Also works with Claude (Claude Code or Claude Desktop) for daily rituals; the Claude Code plugin needs Node 22.7 or newer.

You are the gardener

Your garden is your habit ecosystem, digital and physical: the run and the feed, the call home and the tab you keep reopening.

You are responsible for tending it, and you already do. Zenborg is the toolshed. It helps you tend with more consistency, and return with more resilience when something wilts.

How it works

Plant

Habits, people, places.

Areas are the plots of your life; habits are the perennials; each moment is a 1–3 word intention for today. Grow them with the people and places you care about.

Cultivate

Tend and fence.

Each day, tend what matters, in phases, not hours. Fence out the weeds (sites, feeds) with a pause, not a lockout.

Fences arrive in an update during your first weeks.

Harvest

Reflect and tune.

Look back at the season: what you intended, what held, what wilted. Retune rhythms and attitudes, then plant the next season.

How it looks

The day, in phases.
The garden, by area.
A pause at the fence.

What this is NOT

It looks like just another productivity tool, but a garden isn't a factory.

  • it's not a task manager: no tasks, no checklists, no "done", no projects, no goals, no outcomes
  • it's not a habit tracker: no streaks, no points, no badges and, definitely, no leaderboards
  • it's not a calendar: no reminders, no badges, no sounds
  • it's not a screen-time app: no lockouts, no shame, no daily report card
  • it's not a platform: no accounts, no servers, no analytics, no ads

All of these tools can be useful in their own right, for their own purposes. However, we are exploring a mindful alternative to these conventional paradigms.

Why it matters

Our attention is the product the attention economy sells. Zenborg is my exploration into technology that helps us place it ourselves.

Read why: We, the users, are being used.

Get it

For Macs with Apple Silicon (M1 or later), macOS 11 or newer.

First launch. The app is signed but not yet notarized, so macOS will refuse to open it the first time. Open System Settings, then Privacy & Security, scroll down and click Open Anyway. Once is enough.

Local-first. Everything stays on your Mac, in ~/.zenborg. No account, no server.

What's next

You're one of the first few people trying this. In a week or two, I'll ask you how it's going.

My goal is to answer: "How can we build software and AI aligned with human flourishing?"

« Il faut cultiver notre jardin. »

"One must cultivate one's garden."

Voltaire, Candide, 1759