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The Shortcuts Year

After the gym insight, I wanted to bring that structure to my work. So I built an Apple Shortcut.

It was a simple focus session timer that prompted me to define what I'd work on, ran a countdown, asked for a reflection afterward, and logged everything to macOS Notes as a work journal. Nothing fancy — just enough structure to get started.

I used it every day for a year.

What Worked

It helped me start. The Shortcut gave me a concrete entry point: click the shortcut, type what you're doing, hit go. That was enough to overcome the task initiation barrier on many days. The structure was the key — not willpower, not motivation, just a system that said "type one sentence and begin."

For someone whose brain regularly understands a task is important but can't activate the action, that small prompt made a real difference.

What Didn't Work

It failed to help me pause. The Shortcut could start a timer, but it couldn't gently guide me to stop. There was no ambient awareness of time passing. No soft nudge when I was running over. Just a notification that the timer was done — which I'd often dismiss while hyperfocused and then work for another hour without realizing it.

Notes as a database was fragile. All session logs went into Apple Notes. There was no structure, no way to query, no way to see patterns over time. The data existed but was useless for learning from. I had a year of session logs and couldn't answer basic questions like "how many sessions do I actually complete?" or "when do I tend to burn out?"

No re-entry support. The Shortcut had no concept of carrying context between days. Every morning I'd open it and face the same blank prompt: "What are you working on?" — which is exactly the wrong question for an ADHD brain that has lost its thread overnight. The visible first step was missing.

The Final Push

The Shortcut worked well enough that friends noticed and asked to try it. But Apple Shortcuts can't be easily shared — they break across devices, require manual setup, and have no way to distribute updates. The tool that helped me couldn't help anyone else.

That was the moment it shifted from "I should build this better for myself" to "I should build this so others can use it too." Their interest validated the idea. The inability to share it made building a real app feel necessary, not just nice-to-have.

What the Shortcuts Year Taught Me

It wasn't a failure. It was a year-long prototype that revealed exactly what a proper app needed to do differently:

  1. Starting is only half the problem — you also need help with pacing and stopping. This became Focura's breathing status lights and soft gates.

  2. Logging is useless without structure — data needs to be queryable, not just recorded. This became Focura's SQLite database with structured sessions, feelings, and insights.

  3. The hardest moment isn't during a session — it's the next morning, when you've lost your thread. This became Focura's re-entry points.

These three gaps shaped every feature in the app we built.