Designing private daily briefs for calm mornings

A morning interface should inform without overwhelming. Dimlit scans upcoming commitments and pending reminders locally, distilling the noise into three essential priorities for the day ahead.

Heuristics for information density#

Modern notification systems frequently compete for attention with high frequency and low signal. A calm morning brief takes the opposite stance: strict information triage applied before any pixels render.

Calm software respects attention before action. The interface should explain what matters without demanding an immediate reaction or interrupting morning focus.

The three-item constraint#

To maintain clarity, the local synthesis engine limits the primary morning card to exactly three items:

• Anchor commitment: The earliest immovable event requiring travel or preparation.
• Critical task: The single pending reminder with high deadline sensitivity.
• Contextual note: A relevant detail gathered from recent notes or past calendar meetings.

export interface MorningBriefItem {
  id: string;
  category: 'anchor' | 'critical' | 'contextual';
  headline: string;
  timestamp?: string;
  priorityScore: number;
}

export function filterPriorities(items: MorningBriefItem[]): MorningBriefItem[] {
  return items
    .sort((a, b) => b.priorityScore - a.priorityScore)
    .slice(0, 3);
}

Comparing presentation models#

Each step builds directly upon our on-device speech parsing model and executes through the local neural architecture.