IntoReality

For years I bought notebooks and set up apps over a weekend, then abandoned them by Friday. Each January I started over with a better system. I ended up with a lot of plans and not much of a life.

I quit on day four. I missed once, lost the streak, and stopped opening the app. The trackers I tried made it worse by showing me the broken chain in red, which told me I had failed at the exact moment I needed a reason to continue.

I built IntoReality for myself, around four actions a day and about thirty minutes total.

The four actions

Body. Two minutes of stretching, or thirty seconds in a plank. I am not training for anything. I am staying in touch with the fact that I have a body.

Environment. One thing that removes friction where I live. The dishwasher, or the desk after work.

Mind. A few lines about the day I had, not tomorrow's plan. The entry sits on the device encrypted with AES-256, because I would not write the truth into something I suspected might sync somewhere.

Comfort zone. Fifteen minutes on the task I keep avoiding. The timer starts at fifteen because that is short enough to begin and long enough to count. Most days I keep going past it.

You pick your own four. You know what your life is missing better than I do.

Three out of four counts as a success

I aimed at 100% for years, and a single missed day ended the attempt, because I had broken the streak and saw no reason to continue. At 75% a bad day costs me nothing, so I keep going.

That sounds like a lower standard. I have held it for longer than I held any of the perfect systems.

Marcus Aurelius reviewed his day to act better the next one, and I use the evening entry the same way. Jung described the man who stays a child into adulthood, waiting for his real life to start. I recognized myself in that description, and I built this to end my own waiting.

The things I cut

I removed the task lists and the project boards. Adding them would turn the app into the planning tool I was trying to escape. I cut the confetti and the leaderboard. There is no streak either, since the streak is the mechanism that made me quit.

The data sits in SQLite on your phone and needs no account, so I hold nothing of yours. I added a home screen widget and a calendar heatmap, plus statistics over 7, 30, 90 and 180 days, so you can see the shape of a few months at once.

Core tracking is free and stays that way.

Even on a bad day, you spent thirty minutes in reality.