Pre-release
Lithic is an outliner for people who plan their own work. Write your thinking as a list, drag a line onto a day, give it an hour — and it stays where you put it, on every device and beside everyone else who is in there with you. Hosted in Germany.
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The problem
The list is where the work gets thought through; the calendar is where it gets a time. Between them sits a copy — you retype a line into an appointment, and from that moment there are two of them, and the second one is wrong by Wednesday. Lithic keeps one row. Plan it, move it, finish it: it is the line you wrote, whichever of the two you are looking at.
What it does
Outline
New row, indent, fold, zoom into a branch, move it somewhere else — all from the keyboard, without reaching for the mouse. Type # to tag a row, and renaming a tag renames it everywhere in that document. Ctrl/Cmd + F finds a line in the document you have open; Ctrl/Cmd + K finds the document a word is in, anywhere in the workspace.
Planner
A row is planned into a period: a year, a month, a week, or a day with a start time and a length. Drag it down the stack to get more precise, back up to leave it vague again. Day, week and month views — and when the week starts, which days count as working days and how early the grid opens are settings, not opinions we hold for you.
Agenda
Beside the outline and the planner sits the same document grouped by time: overdue work at the top, then the day, with your meetings in place. You type straight into it, so planning the day and writing the work are the same two minutes.
Projects
Make any row a project and the rows under it are its tasks. A view of its own draws every project as a block with a count of what is done, and an inbox at the foot holds everything that is in no project yet.
Deadlines and rhythms
A deadline is a second field beside the plan: when something has to be finished, as opposed to when you mean to do it, and the chip takes on colour once it has passed. A repeating row carries a rule — every Monday at 8:00, every three days, the last day of the month. Tick it off and it moves on to its next date, with a dated copy filed in the archive.
Calendars
Connect Google or Microsoft 365, or paste the address of an ICS or webcal calendar, and your meetings are drawn in the planner beside your own rows. Each calendar is read-only until you allow writing for it — then moving or renaming a meeting here changes it there. Point a document at a calendar and every task with a day and an hour shows up in it as a real event.
On your phone
Below a tablet’s width Lithic is one screen with a bar at the bottom, and it opens on the agenda. Swipe a row to archive or delete it, hold the margin to indent or move it. Add it to the home screen and it runs full-screen — and a reload with no connection opens the app with the documents you had open, rather than an error page.
Together
Live editing with everyone visible where they are working, on every device you are signed in on. Drag a row and everything under it follows: if somebody is writing inside that branch while you move it, their words are still there afterwards. A version is kept when something changed, not every time a cursor moved.
Markdown
Every outline reads and writes as Markdown: a nested task list, with the plan written into the line. Download a document as a .md file, copy rows out, paste Markdown in, or fetch and replace a whole document over the API. Nothing needs converting, and nothing needs our permission.
Compare
Most people run one of each and copy between them. The two middle columns are categories rather than named products — feature lists move faster than a table can keep up, and the point here is the shape of the tool, not whose logo is on it. Lithic is not open for signup yet; everything in its column is built and running.
| An outliner | A calendar app | Lithic | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Write your thinking as a list | that is the whole point | not really | that is the whole point |
| Give a line a day and an hour | a due date at best | yes, by hand | by dragging, from a year down to 09:30 |
| One item rather than a copy | the plan lives elsewhere | the thinking lives elsewhere | the same row, in both places |
| Your day as a list you can type in | the list, without the times | the times, without the work | the agenda, and you write in it |
| The meetings you already have, beside it | no | that is what it is | Google, Microsoft 365, ICS and webcal |
| Change a meeting where it lives | not applicable | yes | on the calendars you allow writing to |
| Show colleagues the time is taken | no | that is what it is | publish a document’s timeboxes as events |
| Everyone in the same document | sometimes | invitations, not editing | live, everyone visible |
| Move a branch without losing edits | depends on how it syncs | not applicable | moving changes where, never what |
| On a phone | depends on the vendor | yes | a shape of its own; installed, it opens offline |
| Take everything with you | usually files | an appointment export | Markdown, downloaded as a file |
| Data in Germany | depends on the vendor | depends on the vendor | data centre in Germany |
Categories rather than products, on purpose: a table naming competitors is out of date the week after it is written, and we would rather be accurate than pointed. Written September 2026.
Markdown
An outline is stored the way you would write it out by hand: a nested task list, with the plan written into the line itself. That is not an export format sitting next to the real one — it is the document. Read it with anything that reads Markdown, write it back, and the plan comes back with it.
GET /api/v1/workspaces/{id}/outlines/{id}/markdown
# Week 31
- [ ] Onboarding mail [plannedFor:: 2026-08-04] [start:: 09:00]
- [x] Find the old one
- [ ] Decide what paragraph two is for
- [ ] Call the printers [plannedFor:: 2026-08-04] [duration:: 30]
- [ ] The autumn plan [plannedFor:: 2026-W32] [priority:: 2]Nothing here is a second copy of anything.
Data protection
What you plan says a good deal about what you do all day, and it belongs in a German data centre rather than in a US cloud wearing a European label. The data processing agreement belongs to the plan, not to the invoice.
Early access
The outliner and the planner run; we are finishing the parts you would notice were missing. Leave your address and we will write once — when you can sign up, not before.
One email when we open. No newsletter.