About Me

Procrastination was a word I heard almost daily when I was in middle and high school.

I'd have a homework assignment that would take me 15 minutes to do, but instead of doing it, I would play video games or research obscure topics or get sidetracked doing anything that's more interesting than the homework.

I always thought,

"Everyone procrastiates. No one wants to do homework, right?"

But then I'd get hell the next day at school. It was Catholic school, 13 students in my entire class. Lots of time with each indvidual student compared to public school. I'd hear endless complaints from teachers about how they know I'm smart if I'd just apply myself, I'll never make it through college if I don't learn to do the work without having someone circling over me to do the work.

And, in a way, they were right. University was one of the most challenging and frustrating experiences of my life. I made it through, with zero intention of ever going back. Frankly, if I hadn't picked a career I'm deeply interested in, I think I'd be struggling as much, or even more.

While the better habits I needed to develop were slowly being picked up, it was much slower than I expected. I learned that music helped me focus significantly better, a bit of caffeine and a snack can also help me stay on task. Keeping a list of things to do, also super helpful!

However, the patterns of procrastination are not gone. They have just shifted around.

Self Reflection

Part of what triggered this self reflection was me seeking therapy, originally for anxiety.

It was immediately diagnosed by my therapist that I definitely also have ADHD.

Starting constant side projects (and never finishing them), forgetting where I left something I put down mere seconds ago, forgetting something exists until I see it or am reminded of it again, being able to work for hours on a side project but loath folding laundry or cleaning the kitchen, constantly interrupting people when I'm not trying to be rude, oversharing and telling long stories no one asked for. All common symptoms of ADHD.

Focus is not the issue

If you get me to do something that I find fascinating, I'll do it. And if anything, I'll overdo it (until I forget it exists).

I've manually coded projects on a Saturday for 16 hours straight, hackathon style, then struggled to get out of bed in the morning to go to work to do basically the same thing.

I can research and click and read random Wikipedia articles for an hour when the task I was supposed to be working on would've taken me 10 minutes to just do.

I can focus, but I feel like I have zero control over what I focus on.

A task I need to complete can be broken down into three categories: interest, urgent, or other.

An interesting task is something I want to do, and I want to do it well. If you want examples, look at my public GitHub page or watch some of my YouTube. Those took me hours to do, but I did them because I thought they were fun. This blog and my devlog are also good examples as I have no problem writing about things that interest me!

An urgent task is something that stresses me out to the point where I can't focus on anything else. It needs fixed, and it needs fixed now. Nothing else matters until this thing goes away!!! Examples include working on a school project hours before its due, or rapidly cleaning the house because I told my wife I would but I've actually been gaming for the last 3 hours.

Finally there's everything else. If it doesn't fit into one of those categories, it never gets done. The laundry sits in the basket for weeks until I've already used all of it before putting it away.

There are things that fix this

I've tried writing a todo list on my whiteboards, I've tried using Apple Reminders on my phone, pen and paper on the left on my desk, and nothing seemed to help.

There were two issues that came out of this: this required me to write the task down in the first place, and lacked a clear way to prioritze the tasks. I needed reminded of upkeep of the list.

Now I could have just done the more logical thing of finding an existant app that handle this, but I had some specific requirements: It had to have widgets to constantly remind me what I should be doing, it had to work for work, home, and personal tasks, and it should have integration with tools I already use.

lyphe - my life manager

The goal of lyphe (stylized in all lowercase, and pronounced the same as "life") is to be a simple and ADHD friendly way to keep myself on organized and on track, while also not requiring constant upkeep, nagging me, and having any and all integrations I already use.

My issue isn't that I need to know what needs done, its that I need told what to do next, and then constantly reminded of what I'm working on. If I just have an endless list of tasks that need complete, I'll get instantly overwhelmed and get descision paralysis.

For this first version of lyphe, we break tasks down into three categories:

• Work - anything directly related to my day job and career
• Home - chores, housework, anything that needs done
• Personal - fun projects, hobbies, etc

And these are the order they are prioritized. Work always comes first, Home second, Personal third. You set times you can work on these items so they easily slot into your day. For example, work tasks can only be completed between say 8am and 5pm weekdays, home tasks get 6pm to 11pm weekdays and all day weekends, and personal tasks same as home tasks. If there are overlapping times, we simple prioritze the higher category in the list, so by default home tasks are done before personal tasks.

Tasks are then broken into three task size categories:

• Small - Anything that takes less than 30 minutes
• Medium - Anything that takes 30 minutes to 2 hours
• Project - Anything that takes multiple medium sized sessions

I don't love calling it a "project" because there could be many "projects" within what I would normally call a "project" (like a coding project) but its fine for now.

Each morning, you do a Choose triage session. You swipe on a set of tasks you need to get done for the day until all your time is filled. For recurrent tasks, the time it took you the last time is noted and reused next time it comes up. For all other tasks, we assume the max time for that size category to make sure you don't get overwhelmed. For example, small tasks get 30 minutes, medium tasks and projects get 2 hours per day per task. Once your day is full, triage is done.

On the today page, you are given a suggestion for what to work on next, with a few of the tasks after that have not been completed yet. You can reorder them if you think it would be better to get all your small tasks done first, you can put those at the top of the list. We only ever show a few tasks at a time, to make sure you don't get overwhelmed, and we show a progress bar of the full day to keep you motivated to keep filling the bar!

You can connect your Google Calendar for even tighter integration - for example if you have a work day full of meetings, lyphe will automatically take the time you are in meetings away from your available time so you don't accidentally overbook yourself for the day!

I've also included a simple MCP integration so you can use your agent if choice to handle task management, or call directly with an MCP client to script your task management.

A work in progress

This project is not a finished product, and it may never be. Consider this in early alpha as a work out the best method for keeping myself organized an on track, and once I've found the best method for myself, I'll teach others how to use it.

I want to make life easier for myself, and anyone who suffers from any sort of executive dysfunction, or just don't like how existant task management systems work.

I'm using my strengths to fix a weakness

I can write software (or tell an agent to do it), I can spend hours writing a blog post about how I'm writing software to fix my weakness. And there's still some dirty laundry that needs put in the washing machine in my bedroom. This app, lyphe, intends to make sure that I, and hopefully you, finally fold the towels, clean the kitchen, and actually finish that damn project.