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.
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.
The funnel
Two homes, one row of commitment
Setup
The data the system genuinely needs
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.
Coaching, in place
Six tiers of coaching, on the page
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 recurring track
Routines and rituals, never on the board
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
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
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
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.
Built with
A fast client, a shared backend
| Layer | Choice | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Client | React, Vite, TypeScript | Opened dozens of times a day; cold start matters |
| State | Zustand | Transient UI modes stay out of the URL on purpose |
| Data and auth | Supabase, Postgres | Shared project, prefixed tables, Google and password sign-in |
| Editor | TipTap | Free writing with selection, so a line can become an action |
| Audio | Text to speech | Reading by ear, the thread that runs to DeeplyReader |
| Hosting | Vercel | Preview 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