your story, lived out

The Daily
Story

A digital diary and planner where a task is never rewritten, only promoted. One day at a time, scored for play and reflection as well as output.

Enrika Greathouse · product design and build · used daily since 2026

The problem

Every planner makes you copy the list again

A task you did not finish today gets rewritten tomorrow, and the week after, until you stop trusting the list and start keeping it in your head.

Rewriting is the tax

The same line, re-entered, loses its history and its age every time.

Someday and today are one list

With no stages, a three-month ambition sits beside buy milk and both get ignored.

Only output counts

Rest, play and reflection are invisible, so a good day can score as a failure.

The belief it is built on

You never rewrite the task. You promote it.

One line, written once, keeps its identity all the way from someday to the twenty-five minutes you are spending on it right now.

The palette

Warm paper, one teal, five soft signals

A planner is looked at all day, so the ground is paper rather than screen. Colour is reserved for state: what is live, what is done, what kind of effort a thing was.

Paper#F8F4EC · the ground
Ink#1A1A1A
Primary#21AC9C · live and now
Primary light#8AE4E1 · the score
Yellow#E8C547
Orange#F4A261
Coral#F28B82
Purple#C77DFF

Type is Plus Jakarta Sans over Inter, with a hand face for the asides. The accents double as the category colours, so a day's pie chart is already readable.

Design throughline

Nothing asks you to go and look

Most planners collect good data and then bury it behind a tab nobody opens. Everything here speaks up where you already are.

Coaching on the page

The momentum bar sits at the top of today and changes its line as the day fills.

The score opens in place

Tap the points and the breakdown appears over the day you are looking at.

One mechanic, four views

Today, Schedule, Week and Board are the same work at different ranges.

Rest counts

Play, nourish and reflect score alongside work, so a Sabbath is not a zero.

The one surface you travel to is Stats, and it is for quarters and years. That split is deliberate, not an accident of navigation.

The framework I design against

Nine stages, and the three this one skips

A personal tool should not have a referral loop. Saying which stages are deliberately absent is more useful than padding them.

Get them in

Reach
Enroll

Skipped, on purpose

Get them going

First Run
Setup
First Win

Keep them

Home Base
The Loop
Return

Grow through them

Champion
Skipped, on purpose

Six of nine. It is a tool one person uses every morning, and it is better for not pretending to be a community.

The day

One turn, with vision at the centre

Vision sits in the hub because the app says so itself: the north star that everything else flows from. It decides what earns promotion.

Two tracks run through the middle of the day and are kept apart on purpose. Actions complete and travel the funnel. Daily Do's recur and reset.

Both score into the same seven categories, which is what lets one number mean something across a whole day.

Closed daily loop: envision the day, get it out, promote and do, story and score, with vision as the hub
Stats sits outside the ring: quarters and years, read by season

The funnel

Two homes, one row of commitment

Promotion funnel: Bucket List and Ongoing as two sources feeding This Week, Today and Now, with a zap shortcut straight to Now
Ongoing is a home, not a stage: work goes out for a session and comes back, because it is still ongoing

Setup

The data the system genuinely needs

The five step onboarding: identity, narrative, vision, vibes, VIPs
Five steps: Identity, Narrative, Vision, Vibes, VIPs

A lot to ask before anyone has done anything, and here it is earned: you cannot promote toward a vision you have not stated.

This is the clearest case I have built of setup being load-bearing rather than a chore screen wearing a welcome hat.

Home Base

Today, and the one thing you are on

The NOW slot holds a single task with a running timer. Everything else on the day is queued behind it.

VIPs are ranked one to three. The Dailies sit above as a tabbed card: story, vision, and the recurring do's.

The Today view on a busy day, with the NOW slot, a timer, VIPs and the Dailies card
A real day, not a seeded one: this one scored 67 against a next best of 16

Coaching, in place

Six tiers of coaching, on the page

The Flow Up bar reading Ready, with a progress track, an actions count and a coaching line
The bar sits at the top of today; its tier and its line change as the day fills.

Ready · Spark

Nothing done, then the first quarter. The copy is about starting.

Momentum · In the flow

Past a quarter, then past half. The copy protects what is running.

Almost peak · Peak flow

Three quarters, then the whole day as planned. The copy stops pushing.

Nineteen lines in the pool, picked by tier and by whether a focus session is running. Sized against the day you planned, so a light day can still reach peak.

The funnel, in the product

Every action and project, across each stage

The Board: Bucket List, This Week, Today, Now and Ongoing as columns, 271 items, drag to restage
271 items. Drag to restage. The columns are the promotion stages.

The recurring track

Routines and rituals, never on the board

Daily Do's organised by time of day: morning, day, evening, night
By time of day: morning, day, evening, night
Daily Do details grouped by category: move, play, nourish, clean, be, create
By category: move, play, nourish, clean, be, create

Things that complete travel the funnel. Things that recur reset. Most planners conflate the two, which is why a list holding both finish the tax return and drink water serves neither.

Write

Free write, then make a line into an action

Write mode with a timed sprint, a coaching prompt, and speak to write
Timed sprints at 3, 5, 10, 15 and 25 minutes, with a rotating prompt

A coaching toggle, prompts you can shuffle or write yourself, speak-to-write, and video, recording, embed and image attachments.

The AI coaches you on your own words rather than generating for you. Select a line from the freewrite and promote it into a real action for the day.

The feedback step

The score opens on the day you are already on

The score breakdown opening in place over the day, split by category
Tap the points: a breakdown by category, in place

Seven categories: move, play, nourish, clean, be, create and work. Rest and reflection score, so a deliberate day off is not a zero.

This is the step that gets used. It never asks you to navigate anywhere, which is exactly why.

The seasonal layer

Stats is for quarters, not for Tuesday

The Stats view for a month, with points, days, streak and focus counts and a category breakdown
A month at a time, with output split by category

Read at the end of a quarter or a year, against the season of life you were in, rather than as a daily scoreboard.

I built this and I hardly open it. That is the design working: everything with a daily cadence was deliberately put in the path instead.

Vision

The north star everything else flows from

Who I am, a one-line direction, and a three-year picture. The app's own words for this page are the hub of the loop diagram.

It is the reference frame that decides what deserves promoting, which is why it is a mode rather than a settings screen.

The Vision page: identity statement, vision one-liner and three year vision
Identity, one-liner, three-year picture

Built with

A fast client, a shared backend

LayerChoiceWhy
ClientReact, Vite, TypeScriptOpened dozens of times a day; cold start matters
StateZustandTransient UI modes stay out of the URL on purpose
Data and authSupabase, PostgresShared project, prefixed tables, Google and password sign-in
EditorTipTapFree writing with selection, so a line can become an action
AudioText to speechReading by ear, the thread that runs to DeeplyReader
HostingVercelPreview per branch

Built solo, and used every morning. The data in these screenshots is real: 266 actions, 225 logs, 197 time periods.

Where it stands

In daily use, still being shaped

Shipped

The funnel and the zap, NOW timer and focus sessions, the Dailies, scoring across seven categories, Flow Up, Write with coaching, Board, Stats, the five-step setup

In build

Ongoing, the newest column: work with no end date, which recurs until it completes. Still deciding whether it scores per session or on completion

Next

Surfacing Daily Do's in the action list, and a celebration for finishing something that took three months

A sleeper project: no launch, no users to acquire, built for one person who opens it every morning. That is the honest shape of it.

Enrika Greathouse · enrika@smallgorillacreative.com

The Daily Story · case study