An Ambitious Life Manager That Tries to Do It All… and Almost Succeeds

Lotti is an open‑source journal and life manager that aims to integrate tasks, notes, and local AI without relying on the cloud.

I’m busy. Very busy. I have so many projects going on at the moment that I require a bit of help keeping myself organized.

Take, for instance, a hybrid theater/film piece I’m working on. There are several moving parts to this, and I’m pretty much a one-person show. I am the creator, producer, director of photography, and actor.

Yeah, I have a lot to do.

To keep that project moving forward and on time, I have to use apps to keep myself organized. Of course, I’m always looking for a new app to do just that, and recently I came across Lotti, an open source app licensed under GPLv3.

Described as a “comprehensive life management and journaling application that helps you track your goals, habits, and daily activities while maintaining your privacy,” Lotti includes features like:

• Support for text, audio, and images
• Habit tracking and goal management
• Integration of health data
• Local-only data storage
• Local AI support
• Customizable dashboards and analytics
• Theming
• Tags and labels

When I first installed Lotti and started testing it, I was disappointed to discover that it only supports Gemini and ChatGPT AI. Fortunately, I was wrong about that. It’s just the onboarding that offers Gemini and ChatGPT. Once you have everything set up, you can then add the AI app Ollama as a local option — or you don’t have to use AI at all.

I’ve tested it with AI, by connecting it to Ollama, and found that it works pretty well, and there were even instances where I found it actually helpful. For instance, I have a scene to film, and I wanted to add some tips for white balance. I opened the AI chat window, posted my query, and waited for the answer. Once the answer was produced (and I verified it was accurate), I could then paste the results into a text entry added to a logbook entry.

Here’s what you can do with Lotti:

• You can create simple task lists
• You can create logbook entries (think journals or more extensive tasks)
• You can query AI
• You can add timers to a logbook entry
• You can add audio recordings to a logbook entry
• You can add text entries to a logbook entry
• You can add screenshots to a logbook entry

Let me show an example of a Lotti workflow.

Creating a New Logbook Entry

From the main Lotti window, click the plus button at the bottom right.

Once you’ve done that, you can then start filling out information for the task.
Fill out the necessary information, adding name, priority, status, category, date, due date, time estimate, label, checklists, and even linked entries.

Once you’ve taken care of that, click the check near the upper right corner to save the entry.

But Where Does the AI Come In?

Let’s say you need to create a grocery shopping list and you’re vegan (like me). You could either do this manually or you can have the AI feature take care of it.

Before you do this, you’ll need to set up the AI. Make sure you have Ollama installed on the machine hosting Lotti. If you’ve never done this before, you can find complete installation instructions on the article I wrote for FOSS Force in June.

With Ollama installed, click the gear icon near the bottom right of the Lotti window and then click AI Settings. Click Add Provider and, in the resulting window, select Ollama as the Provider type and make sure the Base URL is http://localhost:11434. If you have a remote Ollama server on your LAN, you can also connect to that by replacing localhost with the IP address of the Ollama server.

After taking care of that, click Save, and you’re done.

Now, go to the Task page and click on the AI icon near the top center. In the resulting query page, type your query and wait for the AI to do its thing.

Once the AI has completed its task, you can copy the results and add it to a text note. I do wish the developers would create the means to add AI-generated checklists to a task with the push of a button, but that’s just wishful thinking.

Lotti does have a slight learning curve, but once you’ve become familiar with it you’ll find the app to be really handy. It’s not perfect, but it has just the right amount of features to make it a viable option, especially for those who’d like to add a bit of AI into their journaling/task lists.