Ask HN: Have you coded any productivity software just for yourself?

I created my own static site generator. It allows me to work faster, fully offline, with version control and on slow hardware (at the time, a 12" Macbook). It made my work much easier than when I did updated content through a CMS.

Aside from that, a lot of small optimisations. Sublime Text build systems, shortcuts to switch between projects, SSH aliases, clever dotfile functions, deploy-on-push, and so on.

  - type (string)
  - value (string, mostly float numbers)

  - start
  - end
  - created

tweet: https://twitter.com/__tosh/status/1783904471212335366

Many of the teams I've worked with recently have moved to doing this async with a "standup" message in slack etc.

I know HN sometimes dislikes relenteless self-promotion which this comment will be so I wanted to give a shoutout to two productivity apps I have no affiliation with - Inbox When Ready which lets you search Gmail without being distracted by new emails, and Unhook which lets you search Youtube without seeing recommendations, both of which I find useful for avoiding distractions.

So I made an ultimate habit tracker personalized for my desires. But I feature creeped it to death with features I want and nobody else wants. So one of the "habits" I optimize for is getting enough focused work done on any given day, which I use a time tracker for. And I like to take notes on my work as I do it so I can focus. This is called "interstitial journaling". So I refactored just the time tracking and journaling app into a new app called Interstitch

https://interstitch.app

This app _completely_ flopped on Product Hunt and Reddit as well, despite being free, for a few reasons but one is that people think "interstitial journaling" is more about journaling when its' really more time tracking.

However, it was a double-edged sword because the Reddit post I got 2 upvotes on is now the #2 Google Search result for "interstitial journaling app" which gets me about 5 new users every week. (useful lesson to be learned that sometimes the best SEO is not on your own website).

Most time tracking apps really focus on the invoicing or employee time market, understandably since it's more B2B, but I prefer my app because it's more focused on personal productivity. If you want to lose weight, track what you eat, if you want to focus more on work, track how much time you spend focusing, it keeps you honest and unveils trends. I'm also a big believer it's a helpful tool for ADHD people because "time boxing" / "calendar blocking" is very prescriptive, whereas journaling what you actually did lets you be more flexible with your specific task but still keeps you honest about your overall productivity.

Specifically, my gripe with habit trackers was:

1) They are usually optimized for tracking just a few things. But I have a _lot_ of habits I want to track - health habits, work habits, hell, giving my dog a monthly bath habit. It's not even about perfectly doing everything, it's about gathering the data so that you can view insights and understand yourself. This is also called "life logging" or "the quantified life".

2) They were too prescriptive instead of descriptive. So in my habit tracker, you can just set a goal to say "exercise every day", then if I track that I specifically lifted weights, it "bubbles up" to say that I exercised, since weight lifting is a child of exercise in a big DAG. In this big DAG, I have a bunch of "views" of different sub-trees, so my dog has his own sub-tree that reminds me to get him baths and bring him to the vet, but that's not in my daily core view.

3) I want something with both a good web and mobile experience, though there's a few other apps that do this such as Everyday, none of them also do 1) and 2). My real dream is also super slick Apple Watch integration which I started but it was too much work to build SwiftUI for mobile and Typescript for web and integrate them nicely.

So the app is called Navigoals ( https://navigoals.com ) . For reasons I still can't explain, YC actually gave me an interview to pitch it but the pitch went about as terribly as it possibly could have. Because of aforementioned feature creep, I closed signups and if I build on anything it would just be Interstitch which is simpler and more polished but Navigoals does have a Youtube demo on its landing page.

I want to say that people love to dunk on programmers building another TODO-list apps or habit tracker. I do think it's going to be a bad business strategy the vast majority of the time unless you have top notch design and marketing skills. But, I think it's a fantastic way to do things like learn a new tech stack or design stack and the end result is a tool that's optimized for your own use case. Productivity tends to be a very personalized thing without good "one size fits all" solutions , even things like Notion which try to be the kitchen sink don't have basic things like real features you need for a great habit tracker, so I highly encourage people to ignore the naysayers and build the best tool for themselves.

I can say personally that Navigoals and Interstitch both forced me to be a lot more honest about some bad habits I had and how I spent my time. For example, I was in huge denial about the impact of marijuana use on my productivity but seeing the days I used it and the clear decline in other health and focus metrics in the week I used it made me realize I had to quit partaking in it if I wanted to achieve my other goals.