Show IH: I built a project tracker and accidentally discovered it was also a mental health tool
I've been vibe coding for about a year now and the further I go, the harder it gets to keep track of where I am across everything. I'd open a project, find my latest chat, and just pray I remembered where I left off. I had a messy note in my Notes app that wasn't really cutting it. Everything else I found was either too complex or not really built for this problem.
So I decided to build my own solution.
I created an app called Ekisoba that gives you a studio view of all your projects, each one opening into a clear timeline of your sessions. You add a new session by just pasting a prompt into your AI assistant, or syncing with GitHub. For the design, I took inspiration from Tokyo Metro wayfinding signs, which ended up being a surprisingly useful north star for someone with basically no graphic design background.
The app has been working great and I use it every day on my own projects. But here's what surprised me: when I finish a session and sync to create a new station, something clicks mentally. It's not just that my work is recorded; it feels like I stepped off the train and heard the doors shut behind me. There's a real decluttering effect, a way of setting down what I was working on rather than just stopping mid-thought and walking away. I didn't set out to build a mental health tool but I think that's part of what it is, and it might be the thing people think about least when they're choosing a productivity tool.
The broader observation is this: if someone like me (who still has to ask Claude whether I need to deploy after a change!) can build something this useful for myself, then I think almost anyone can. And I think that's where we're headed. The tools that help us build are going to be built by the same people who need them. The vision and execution is what sets each one apart.
How is everyone else here organizing their projects? Is what you're using actually working for you?
If you're curious about Ekisoba, it's live at ekisoba.app.
The "doors shut behind me" thing is the real insight here, and it's underrated. Recording state and closing state are different jobs, and most tools only do the first one. I've been building in a related direction with a project of mine, except mine watches behavior over time and follows up on its own instead of waiting to be opened, so the "stepping off the train" moment comes to you rather than you having to go log it. For organizing right now I'm mostly living in scattered chats too, so honestly Ekisoba's station-timeline framing is the cleanest version of this I've seen. Tokyo Metro as a design north star is a great call.
There's something really satisfying about a clean end to a session, even if you haven't finished at an ideal stopping point, so your tool sounds ideal for a lot of people.
Your broader point also landed, and the tools being built by the people that need them should be more successful because of it. I've been working on a procrastination tool myself, because I suffer from it.
To answer your question — my own project organization definitely needs work. I'll take a look at Ekisoba and will let you know how I get on!
Hey Rob, I appreciate that, thank you! And yeah the procrastination tool sounds like exactly the same pattern: building for yourself because you feel the problem directly. I'd love to hear about your experience with Ekisoba and any thoughts you have after checking it out!
I gave it a proper try and added one station with my hiring tool project. Once it clicked, I could genuinely see the value — having the goal, current state, open questions and next steps all in one place on a timeline is really clean.
One bit of feedback: the Copy Prompt works well but doesn't specify that the ## headers need to be kept intact. When I pasted the prompt into Claude, it stripped them out, and the importer failed with a vague error message that didn't tell me what was wrong. Once I figured out the ## issue and re-pasted with them included, it stamped perfectly.
Worth either adding a note to the prompt itself ('keep ## headers exactly as shown') or making the error message more specific. Small thing but it caused unnecessary friction on the first try.
Hey Rob, this is so helpful, thank you for actually trying it! I'm really grateful, and also glad it "clicked" once you got past that friction.
The ## headers issue sounds like a real bug, but should be an easy fix... I'll add a note to the prompt copy and improve that error message so it actually tells the user what's wrong. Should've caught that.
Appreciate you taking the time to dig in and report back. Thanks again.
The accidental discovery is usually more honest signal than the planned feature. Same pattern in my own work - the tooling I built to debug my agent experiments ended up being what I used most, while the agent layer became the thing I had to talk about. What were the first three indicators you noticed users using the tracker for mental-health context, and would you have built differently if you'd known up front?
That's a really interesting pattern... the tool you built to solve an adjacent problem becoming the thing you actually rely on. What does the debugging tooling look like? Just curious whether it stayed internal or whether you've thought about it as a standalone thing?
Stayed internal so far - mostly because the debugging tooling is tied to the specific orchestrator we use, so unbundling it would mean rewriting half of it. The most useful pieces are the trace replay (rerun a specific agent step against the same context to see if the new prompt fixes it) and the diff-between-runs view. Both are about answering 'did anything actually change' without re-running the whole pipeline. Not standalone-worthy yet, but I keep getting tempted.
Got it. Yeah "I keep getting tempted" sounds like a sign though haha. Not an engineer, so don't follow the trace replay and diff-between-runs pieces 100%, but they sound useful beyond your own setup!
Ha, you caught the tell. It stays internal less because of the orchestrator coupling and more because "did anything actually change" is only worth tooling once you're running enough agents that eyeballing it breaks down. I'll probably know it's standalone-worthy when I stop being tempted and start being annoyed.
The mental health angle makes total sense when you think about what project tracking actually is - it's externalizing the working memory load that would otherwise sit as background anxiety.
The 'open loops' concept from GTD was always about this: an unclosed loop (unfinished project, untracked commitment) occupies mental RAM even when you're not actively working on it. Capturing it in a system closes the loop psychologically, even before the task is done.
What I find with solo founders specifically is that the anxiety isn't usually about having too much to do. It's about not having a clear view of what's actually active vs. what's been quietly dropping through the cracks. A Projects database that shows everything in one view, linked to clients and revenue, removes that ambient dread.
I've been building a Solopreneur OS in Notion that has this as a core design goal - not 'track your tasks' but 'have a single place where nothing can silently disappear.' The weekly review database is where you surface what's at risk before it becomes a crisis.
What's the mental health signal you track in the tool - is it self-reported, or inferred from usage patterns?
Whoa I totally hadn't made the GTD connection, but it makes total sense - Ekisoba is doing something pretty similar to what David Allen was describing, just scoped to build sessions rather than tasks. And the honest answer to your question is: I'm not actually tracking any mental health signal, at least not intentionally (thus the "accidentally" in the title). But your comment makes me wonder whether I should be...
I'd love to hear about what you're building with the Solopreneur OS, that sounds like you've thought about this problem, too, from a different angle.
The mental health dimension makes sense when you think about what tracking actually does at a cognitive level. Untracked tasks create open loops -- your brain keeps scanning for them because it doesn't trust they're handled. Getting things into a system closes the loop and offloads the cognitive monitoring work. The version that hits solo founders hardest is operational debt: the decisions, commitments, and processes that live in your head because they've never been captured anywhere. Every meeting where you have to reconstruct context from memory, every time you re-derive a decision you already made, every async update written from scratch -- that's operational debt accumulating. The founders who describe their tools as 'clarity' rather than 'productivity' are usually the ones who've solved the capture problem first and are genuinely working from a system rather than from memory. Did you notice a threshold -- like a number of tracked items or days using it -- where the mental health effect kicked in?
Well, I don't think I noticed a specific threshold, it was more immediate for me than that. The moment I had things captured somewhere structured rather than just floating around in my head every time I re-entered a chat, something just felt settled. Maybe that's the answer, for me at least: the relief wasn't gradual, it was pretty instant.
The 'doors shutting behind you' metaphor is the right one. What you're describing is a closure mechanism -- the thing your brain needs to properly offload working memory. Most project tools don't provide it because they're optimized for state visibility ('where is everything?') rather than state transition ('I'm done for now, here's a clean handoff to future me').
The mental health connection makes sense once you frame it this way: cognitive load isn't just about how much information you hold, it's about how much uncertainty you carry. A project with no defined 'session end' means your brain never fully releases the context -- it stays in the background as an open loop. Ekisoba is closing that loop with a ritual (paste the prompt, sync, done).
Answering your question directly: for solo founders running multiple client projects in parallel, the organizing problem is usually one level up -- not just 'where did I leave off in this project' but 'which of my 4 active projects needs attention this week and what does the status of each actually mean for my revenue.' When I've looked at how one-person businesses actually run ops, the pattern that works is a linked system: project status propagating to client portal (so clients see current state without you updating them manually), project completion triggering revenue recognition in a dashboard. The 'mental relief' version of that is the same as yours -- you stop carrying all those linkages in your head because the system maintains them.
What's the next step you're thinking about for Ekisoba -- staying focused on the vibe coding workflow or expanding toward the general solo-project-runner audience?
You know, "Clean handoff to future me" is probably the best description of what Ekisoba does that I've read anywhere, maybe including on my own landing page haha. And your question about vibe coding vs general solo-project-runners is one I really need to think about. Right now I'm staying focused on the vibe coding workflow because that's where I live and where the pain is most real for me. But it's really interesting that maybe there's a broader pull.
Thank you so much for the thoughtful comments btw. You've really given me a lot to consider and I'm very grateful!
Yes, I never realized how many of us are going this until I read it. This is. Real problem!
I know right? I also kind of didn't realize how much mental energy I was spending just trying to retrace my steps to where I was until I started using something that handled it for me. Glad it resonated with you!
The mental health angle makes complete sense once you think about it — context switching between projects without a clear "where did I leave off" is genuinely stressful. It's not just disorganization, it's the cognitive load of constantly reconstructing your own state.
The "built it for myself" origin is strong here too. The best tools come from builders who felt the pain firsthand rather than assumed it existed. Curious how you're thinking about the line between personal tool and something others pay for — that transition is usually where it gets interesting.
Thank you, yeah, it sounds like you totally get it(!). And I've been thinking about this a lot. I guess part of why I shared this post was to figure that out: whether other people feel the same friction when building or if I just created something that solves my own weird problem. The "built it for myself" origin also means I have a sample size of one haha. So hearing that someone else has a similar pain point is actually really useful data for me right now.
Healthtech founder here — the mental health angle is brilliant. Dashboards that actually care about the user win.
Thank you! Just curious, if you don't mind: as a healthtech founder, do you think I should lean into the mental health angle as a feature, or does that kind of more explicit positioning tend to put people off, in your experience?
Lean into it — but frame it as "wellness" or "team health" rather than "mental health." Same benefit, less stigma.
In healthtech, we see this all the time: "patient intake dashboard" converts better than "mental health tracker." The feature is the same, the positioning changes everything.
Happy to chat more if you're shaping the messaging. Good luck with the launch
Great experiment, interesting to see the retention data
i need 200$ as a invesment in my app whos intrested
The interesting part here is not just project tracking. It is the “closure” layer after a work session. Most productivity tools help people start, organize, or continue work, but very few help them mentally exit a project without carrying the unfinished context around.
That “stepping off the train” feeling is probably the strongest positioning signal in the whole product. The Tokyo Metro metaphor makes Ekisoba memorable, but the real benefit sounds more like cognitive offloading for AI-assisted builders: capture the state, close the loop, and come back without anxiety.
One thing I’d think about is whether Ekisoba will still fit if the mental-health/productivity side becomes the main hook. If it moves beyond a niche project tracker into a calmer work-recovery tool, a softer name like Lyriso.com could carry that emotional clarity better.
I appreciate that framing, thanks Aryan. The "closure layer" is actually even a better way to describe it than I've been doing. The cognitive offloading angle is also really great and probably something I should consider punching up more when I talk about it. Thank you, that gives me something to think about...
Glad that landed.
I think “closure layer” is worth taking seriously because it changes the product from a project tracker into something more emotionally useful.
Most tools help people manage work. This feels more like helping someone leave the work cleanly without the mental residue following them.
That is also where I’d keep an eye on the name.
Ekisoba is memorable and has a story, but if the product starts being understood as cognitive offloading, recovery, and clean re-entry into work, the emotional tone may matter more than the metaphor.
Not saying change it now. But I’d watch whether users describe the value as “project tracking” or as “I can finally close the loop and come back without anxiety.”
If it is the second, the naming question becomes much more important.
Thanks, Aryan, that's a useful way to think about it... watching how users actually describe the value rather than how I describe it. I'll pay attention to that.
You’re welcome.
One thing I’d add before you wait too long on this: if “closure layer” and cognitive offloading become the direction, the name decision matters earlier than it looks.
Because once you start publicly teaching people that Ekisoba means this calmer work-recovery layer, you’re investing energy into making the metaphor carry the category.
That can work, but it also creates cost.
If the product is really moving toward “close the loop and come back without anxiety,” then a name with softer emotional clarity may do that job faster than a metaphor users need to learn.
That’s why Lyriso.com came to mind. It feels closer to calm productivity, recovery, and clean re-entry than project tracking.
I’m not saying you need to change immediately. But if that emotional direction feels right, I’d at least pressure-test Lyriso before Ekisoba becomes harder to unwind.
Fair point on the timing question; I'll keep watching for that signal, thank you!
Makes sense.
I think that is the right way to handle it for now.
If users start repeating the emotional value back to you, not just the project-tracking function, that will be the real signal.
Happy to stay connected on LinkedIn and revisit once you have a few more user reactions. This is the kind of product where the naming question will become much clearer once people describe what it actually helps them feel.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/aryan-y-0163b0278/
Thank you, you're right, that's the real signal... waiting to hear how users actually describe what it helps them feel rather than projecting it myself. Appreciate you pushing on this throughout the thread, it's been genuinely useful.
One practical thought here.
Since the real question is not just the name, but whether users experience Ekisoba as project tracking, closure, cognitive offloading, or calmer work recovery, this might be worth pressure-testing more deliberately before you build too much around one frame.
I do focused naming and positioning audits for early products: current name risk, category framing, domain/name ceiling, user-perception risk, and what stronger direction I’d take before more users, launch assets, or public memory build around the current name.
For Ekisoba, the useful question would be whether the metaphor is helping the product feel memorable, or whether it is making users work too hard to understand the emotional value.
Not a long consulting thing. Just a sharp written breakdown with practical recommendations.
I’m doing a few at $99 while refining the format. If useful, I can do one for Ekisoba and give you a clear outside read on whether to keep the current frame, sharpen it, or seriously test a softer brand direction like Lyriso.
Glad it was useful.
Yes, that user language is probably the thing to watch closest.
If people describe Ekisoba as “tracking projects,” then the current frame may be fine.
But if they start saying things like “it helps me stop carrying unfinished work around,” “I can close the loop,” or “I come back with less anxiety,” then the product is no longer just productivity. It is moving into emotional recovery and cognitive offloading.
That is when the naming question becomes sharper.
At that point, Lyriso would be worth revisiting seriously because it naturally carries the softer calm-productivity direction without needing the user to learn the metaphor first.
For now, I’d keep listening for that exact language from users.