For clinicians & care partners
DO NOW is a cognitive-assistive application for people with impaired task initiation, sequencing, and working memory — after brain injury, with ADHD, or alongside other conditions affecting executive function. It presents one action at a time and adapts how that action is delivered to each person's specific pattern of difficulty.
Clinician & care partner features
Most of the previous page explains how DO NOW works for the person using it. This section is about what it does for clinicians and care partners.
Upload a care plan, discharge summary, or therapy plan as a PDF or text file. DO NOW converts it into scheduled tasks and routines in the client's account, under Care Plan in the app's navigation.
Set how much scaffolding the person gets across eight dimensions — step size, decisions made for them, how they re-enter an interrupted task. Do it with them in session, or on their behalf if answering questions is itself hard right now. Step it down as function returns.
Free access for clinical pilots, configuration support, and data export if you are running a formal evaluation. We are actively looking for clinicians willing to try it with a few clients and tell us what happens — including when it doesn't work.
If a client needs this paid for by someone other than themselves, we will help you write the functional rationale — for a vocational rehabilitation employment plan, or a VA electronic cognitive device recommendation. We will also tell you plainly which routes don't work.
Not yet available: a shared progress view letting you see what carried over between sessions. It is the most requested thing on this page and it is next in line.
Most task applications assume the user can hold a list in working memory, prioritize across it, and self-initiate. For the people you work with, each of those assumptions is the deficit.
DO NOW inverts the model. The user is shown a single action — never a list, never a queue, never a backlog. When it's finished, the next one appears. There are three responses available at any moment: complete it, snooze it, or skip it. Snoozing and skipping carry no penalty, no streak loss, and no accumulating visual debt, because for this population the shame response to a visible list of failures is itself a barrier to re-engagement.
| Deficit | What DO NOW does | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Task initiation | Presents one action, sized to the person's stated need for scaffolding. Optional automatic decomposition into a first micro-step. | The most common reason a task fails is that it was never small enough to begin. |
| Decision fatigue | Can select the next action on the user's behalf, removing the choice entirely. | Configurable: choose for me / recommend one / show options. |
| Working memory | Re-entry support on returning to a task — recap of where the person left off, or a brief cue, per preference. | Particularly relevant after interruption or a day away. |
| Sequencing | Breaks a stated goal into ordered steps with time estimates. Reusable checklists hold their order every time. | Order stability matters for procedural learning. |
| Time blindness | Scheduled breaks, recurring routines, and configurable reminder density from one per day to seven. | Routines act as time anchors without requiring the user to track time. |
| Reading & fatigue | Tasks and steps can be read aloud. | Supports aphasia, visual fatigue, and low-energy periods. |
| Motivation & reinforcement | The person names one goal they are working toward and one reward they would like, both in their own words. Do Now holds the goal and surfaces only the next action. | Self-selected reinforcement rather than app-imposed points or streaks. Nothing is lost or revoked on a bad day. |
| Carryover to home | Upload a written care plan — PDF or text — and DO NOW converts it into scheduled tasks and routines. Found under Care Plan in the app's main navigation. Available | Removes the requirement that the client reconstruct the plan from memory between sessions. |
The design premise is that the interface should absorb the executive load, rather than requiring the person to supply it before they can begin.
This is the part most relevant to clinical use, and the part that distinguishes DO NOW from consumer task applications. The interface is not fixed. It is configured against eight dimensions of support need.
At first use, a short intake establishes a baseline. Each dimension can be adjusted at any time by the user, or by a clinician or care partner setting the tool up on their behalf. Changes apply immediately to how tasks are presented and worded.
| Dimension | Settings | Clinical relevance |
|---|---|---|
| Step size | Smaller · Balanced · Bigger | Granularity of decomposition |
| Amount of information | One thing at a time · A small batch · Everything available | Cognitive load ceiling |
| Explanations | Plain and concrete · Some context · Detailed | Abstraction tolerance; useful in aphasia and post-acute recovery |
| Decisions | Choose for me · Recommend one · Show options | Decision-making support level |
| Planning | Ordered plan · Light order · No set order | Structure dependence |
| Getting started | Hand-hold to start · A nudge · Just tell me | Initiation scaffolding |
| Keeping moving | Step by step · Occasional guidance · Independent | Sustained attention support |
| Returning to tasks | Recap where I was · Brief reminder · Jump back in | Working memory and re-entry support |
Support levels can be reduced deliberately over time. A person discharged from inpatient rehabilitation might begin at maximum scaffolding across all eight dimensions and step down as function returns — which makes the profile itself a rough record of changing support needs.
The profile adjusts presentation — how much is shown, how it's worded, how much is decided for the user. It does not assess, diagnose, or measure function, and the settings are self-reported preferences rather than validated scores. Please treat the profile as a configuration record, not as clinical data.
Set the profile with the client during session, then use their own real tasks rather than clinic-generated ones. The decomposition feature externalizes the sequencing you would otherwise model verbally, and the client keeps it between sessions.
Configure high scaffolding before discharge and let the person carry the structure home. Routines can hold the shape of a daily schedule that was previously supplied by the unit.
Where task initiation and follow-through affect job performance, the tool functions as a workplace accommodation. See funding for how this is typically written into an employment plan.
Useful as a compensatory strategy alongside recommendations, particularly where a report identifies impaired initiation with relatively preserved comprehension.
Many of the people who find DO NOW are spouses, parents, and adult children setting it up for someone else. That is a supported use, and a few things are worth knowing.
It is not a medical device, not a therapeutic intervention, and not a substitute for rehabilitation. It does not treat brain injury or ADHD. It is a compensatory tool — the software equivalent of a written checklist or a labelled pill organizer, adapted to the person using it.
It is also a poor fit for some people, and we would rather say so: those who need supervision for safety-critical activities, those for whom smartphone use is itself effortful, and those in acute recovery where the immediate priority is clinician-led rehabilitation rather than independent task management.
Clients frequently ask whether this can be paid for by someone other than themselves. Here is a straight answer for each route, including the ones that don't work.
Where task initiation and follow-through affect a client's ability to obtain or maintain employment, a counselor can write assistive technology into an Individualized Plan for Employment under the "other goods and services" category. In Michigan, purchases below $5,000 do not require competitive bids, and an annual subscription falls far below that threshold. No approved-vendor listing is required for purchases at this scale — counselor judgment and documentation of functional need are the operative requirements.
Framing that tends to work: client uses task-initiation software to compensate for executive dysfunction affecting job performance. Framing that tends not to: general quality-of-life benefit unconnected to an employment goal.
VHA clinical practice recommendations for electronic cognitive devices explicitly include smartphones and applications among the tools that "reduce the cognitive demands of a task or transform the task or environment to match the users' abilities." Recommendations route through Prosthetic and Sensory Aids Service. Small purchases can be made on government purchase cards.
If you're a VA clinician and this is a route you'd consider for a patient, please get in touch — we'd like to make the procurement side as easy as possible and to learn where it stalls.
Employers can purchase task-management tools as reasonable accommodation under the ADA. The Job Accommodation Network lists assistive technology, including applications, among recommended accommodations for executive-function difficulties. An annual license is a low-cost accommodation by any standard.
The core application is free and remains free — one task at a time, focus mode, snooze, breaks, and routines. Hardship and student pricing on the paid tier is available on request, without documentation or explanation. If you have a client for whom cost is the obstacle, write to us and we will sort it out. We would rather someone use it than not.
You are going to ask what the evidence base is. The truthful answer has two parts, and we would rather give you both than oversell one.
The category is established. External cognitive aids are long-standing practice in brain injury rehabilitation, and VHA clinical practice recommendations for electronic cognitive devices reflect that. The general principle DO NOW is built on — reducing cognitive demand at the point of task initiation, and providing external structure for sequencing and re-entry — is not novel and does not need to be.
This specific product has not been studied. There are no published trials of DO NOW, no efficacy data, and no validated outcome measures attached to it. It is a new product from a small company. Anyone telling you otherwise about a tool at this stage is selling something.
What we can describe is the design rationale, the mechanism, and the configurability — which is what this page is for. What we cannot yet describe is an effect size.
We are actively looking for clinicians and researchers willing to use DO NOW with a small number of clients and tell us what happens — including when it doesn't work, which is the more useful finding.
We can provide free access for clinical pilots, configuration support, and data export for anyone conducting formal evaluation. If you are pursuing funding for assistive technology research and a configurable task-initiation tool would be useful to your protocol, we would like to hear from you.
DO NOW was built by Stephen Craig, who sustained a traumatic brain injury in a car accident at sixteen and spent decades unable to reliably carry his own projects from intention to completion. The design decisions on this page — particularly the absence of penalties, the removal of the visible backlog, and the emphasis on initiation over organization — come from that experience rather than from a product roadmap. We mention it because clinicians reasonably ask who designed a tool and on what basis.
Marked clearly either way, because we would rather you know exactly what exists today than be surprised later.
A clinician or care partner can upload a written plan — a care plan, discharge summary, or therapy plan, as a PDF or text file — and DO NOW converts it into scheduled tasks and routines in the client's account. Carryover between sessions no longer depends on the client reconstructing the plan from memory.
Newly released. If the plans you write don't convert cleanly, tell us the format you use and we'll fix the parsing — that feedback is more useful to us right now than almost anything else.
An optional, user-controlled way to share progress with a named clinician or care partner, so that a therapist can see what carried over between sessions without the person having to recall and report it.
Design constraint: consent-based and revocable by the user. We are not building surveillance.
Care plan upload is live now. The shared progress view is not yet available — if it is decisive for your setting, tell us and it will influence when it ships.
Full privacy policy and terms of service.
There is a person on the other end of this address, and it is usually the founder.
Walkthroughs, pilot access, configuration support, and help with documentation for funding requests.
Setting it up for someone else, questions about whether it suits a particular situation, or access if cost is the barrier.