Great heroes have great origin stories. They overcome challenges and setbacks on their journey to transform into the person they become. In this story, the hero is an idea to help people survive and thrive at work and in life.
Coping with anxiety
Since childhood, I’ve struggled with anxiety. Externally, I was high-functioning, doing well in structured environments like school, sometimes sports, and work. But often, in moments of solitude, self-doubt and self-criticism would consume me with guilt and shame. I would ruminate over my day and past, obsessing over the smallest perceived missteps and mistakes. Had I said the wrong thing? What would be the backlash? Who saw my mistake? Would I ever get it right? Why didn’t I think of that beforehand? Why was I always wrong? Why are so many people judging me? All of this anxiety crippled me, burning off time and emotional energy, keeping me from living a life of contentment, fulfillment and satisfaction. Anxiety does not go away on its own. Unresolved, it followed me into adult life and the chaos of corporate work.
Permission to do good work
“Most of what we call management consists of making it difficult for people to get their work done.” - Peter Drucker.
There are many reasons to criticize corporate work, but the financial reality is that it pays better than anything short of owning a successful business. This seemingly best-paying, low-risk world can easily feel like a wasteland of perpetual, unresolvable stress. It’s not just the low/no-value meetings. It's the lack of clear, meaningful, measurable goals, miscommunication, and over-communication. We all want to do good work, but the signals of good are drowned in an ocean of second-guessing and noise. When work is not working, it’s hard to find permission to experiment in ways that will improve the situation. The political and financial risks are too great.
Trying to do more than survive
I’ve spent a lot of my career looking for silver bullets to gain control over my work and life stress. Over the years, I’ve found some good solutions from people, including management consultant Peter Drucker, personal productivity coaches like Steven Covey, David Allen (GTD), Francisco Cirillo (the Pomodoro Technique), and lately, Tim Farris (The 4-Hour Workweek).
After immersing myself in the writings of each one, I found, on the whole, these methods were difficult to maintain. For different reasons, in practice, they created more burdens than benefits. To make the most of each, I pulled off standalone parts and experimented by stacking them into something durable. My approach was inelegant, but it had a heartbeat and worked.
A need for speed
My Frankenstein method had a pulse, but on many days, it still felt like I was trying to start a mile-long train from a dead stop. I wanted a faster way to make this hacked method work, no matter what kind of task I needed to do. Looking for that speed, I tried every task and time-management app I could find. There were some notable misses along the way, but nothing seemed to fit. In most cases, what I found made the process harder and slower. Spreadsheets seemed even more cumbersome, so I stayed away from those for as long as possible. I was running out of options. I was tired of just surviving, and I was stuck.
DIY In case of emergency
By the end of 2014, I put my app search on pause. It had been another year of promise and hope washed away with the usual anxiety and frustration. I had this nagging feeling that I could accomplish so much more if I could find the clarity to get my work under control. And if I could do that, I could free up the time and mental space to pursue something personally meaningful, like a lifelong dream.
My options seemed limited. I couldn’t find an app that worked, and I was overwhelmed and intimidated by the idea of learning to code to build my own. Despite having a vision for what I wanted to build, I feared the programming learning curve. Yet each day, I had to get up and almost helplessly face the daily unresolvable stresses of work and life. So, on December 30, 2014, with no place to hide, I decided that 2015 would be the year I found a way forward. I opened a new spreadsheet with no coding or design skills and naively began designing and coding an app.
Powering up with Momentum
It took several months to learn to code in Microsoft Excel, but I did it. Between January and August, I learned the fundamentals of coding and built a working app. It lacked many features, but I had a tool that provided clarity and motivating signals for surviving my workday. Like a power-up, the app made the function of planning fast and the act of focusing and working hard easier and more consistent. No matter what chaos I was in, it gave me a safe place to measure what mattered: my time, focus, and effort. I now had a sense of control over one part of my life, my work life. It felt like a legitimate thing, a (super) tool that could get and keep me moving. I called it Momentum.
Another roadblock
Feeling inspired, I told my story to friends, family, and acquaintances, and they were supportive and often asked to see and try it. When I gave a demo, they didn’t “get it.” I knew it wasn’t them; it was the app. I believed in the problem I was trying to solve but suspected I was only solving a small part of something bigger. I was off the mark and didn’t know how to push forward with an overbuilt spreadsheet. So, I kept my story to myself for several years, almost embarrassed to admit I had built yet another (kludgy) task app.
Another attempt to break through
After years of using my Excel app and consistently breaching its limits, I finally decided it was time to make a go at rebuilding it on a scalable software platform. At the start of this year, I set a goal to build a minimum viable version of the app using Javascript. Despite the steep learning curve, I felt compelled to climb it. I understood how to code, but not on a scalable platform with databases, user authentication, etc., and I would need help. So, to accelerate learning the language, I enlisted the help of a good friend and accomplished software developer, Lou Franco. After talking it through, surprisingly, Lou offered to help build the app if I could design and market it. Suddenly, there were new paths leading forward.
Picking the right path
Thrilled with the opportunity to work with Lou, I was also deathly afraid to waste our time building the wrong thing. I didn’t want to end up with something that only Lou and I would use. Failing fast is good, but failing small and fast is better. I didn’t want to waste this shot, so I turned to what I’d learned in the field of product management, beginning with the “problem discovery process.”
Rather than rush to build a copy of what I had hacked together within Excel, we stopped to think and model the root problem we were trying to solve. I looked at the competitive landscape and did some deep soul-searching to understand why I felt so compelled to build an app in Excel in the first place.
There are tons of task apps on the market. Why create yet another one? Because there is an unresolved problem. I feel it virtually every single day. I needed to understand it better, so I started talking to a still small but wider circle of people. The more conversations I had, the more I realized that others have a very similar, if not the same, problem. I looked at how they tried to solve it, seeing similar patterns. I tried modeling all of the things that make up the problem. I kept talking about it, refining the conversation until the ideas seemed to come full circle.
Testing the hypothesis
Within a couple of months of deep work, I felt like I had landed on a root cause, the real why behind all of my years of struggle. My hypothesis:
Many people are overwhelmed with daily chaos and cannot sustain the time, focus, and energy to experiment with pursuing their dreams.
Better, accurate signals would give us boundaries for the chaos and amplify our focus, energy, and time for what gives true satisfaction.
All of my method hacking and app building was an attempt to free up meaningful time to accomplish something big in my life. It might be to build the app, start a business, learn to play guitar, and write music. It could be to spend more time sailing or be more relaxed and able to enjoy life without constantly grinding through it. Chaos is a fact of life. I needed a better way to embrace it, to create boundaries around it. I wanted an easier way to do the harder things that are fulfilling rather than remain stuck in the passive comfort of shallow socializing, entertainment, and sports. I didn’t want another day, week, month, or year of regret for what could have been. I wanted a better way to control and live my life.
Your call to join the journey
This brings me to the why behind this post. Why am I telling you this story and putting it out there? To move forward in this journey, I need your help. I need to talk with more people to get more perspectives on 1) how common this problem is, 2) how you think about the problem, and 3) how my design concepts make you feel when you think about the problem. I aim to talk with 30 people by the end of December 2023. If you want to see where this journey leads and join the conversation, please submit your email address below, and I’ll be in touch soon.