For more than 3 years, I’ve been building a custom life-organization system so that I can organize my thoughts and my goals, and my tasks, so that I can more effectively make my dreams real, and so that I can understand and live up to my values.

This started as customizing ClickUp’s Docs and Tasks. I used Docs to allow me to quickly journal every day and to take task and event specific notes. I nested Daily Journals inside of a month, and then that month inside of a quarter and the quarters were nested into a year, so that I could close out a Month Quarter and Year, visually, to minimize clutter, while making it easy to find what I was thinking and talking about on a given day.

I use ClickUp’s task management tools to organize my tasks into different projects/spaces, so that I can put some thoughts into actionable steps, and then plan when I want to work on those steps, roughly, and track when they are complete! As I mentioned, I also have Docs within tasks, and Docs within projects, and use those to take notes on what I was doing as it related to tasks and larger goals. It helps me to do a version of “thinking out loud” and I often find solutions and new ideas as I am typing. I can also use my notes to keep track of where I left off on a particular task, even if I’m in the middle of researching or troubleshooting something, so that I don’t feel obligated to stay on the trail of a particular task or problem until it’s done. This is very helpful for long running tasks that I need to break into smaller chunks of time, or troubleshooting a bug (which has no defined end time).

Clickup’s search functionality makes it very easy to search across tasks, notes and projects so that I can jump right in!

I use Clickup’s templates to create my daily journals, and to create my weekly and daily plans

I really enjoy my ClickUp experience on the desktop/web. I’ve found it hard to use the mobile and ipad app, which would be great to be able to take notes and manage tasks on the go. I also have found that it would be useful if there was either a simpler way to create my daily journals, or a way for journals to easily be visually grouped by a given day.

I’d like to create and iterate on my own life-organization app, so that I adjust the mobile experience as I see fit, and add useful features like grouping journals by day. And over time I can customize the user experience to continue to evolve to my needs.

I started with a version of this “Organize My Life” (OML) tool in React with a firebase backend, because I felt like those were great tools to build something quickly and learn more about what I wanted from OML, before perhaps giving it a more robust Rails or NodeJS backend.

Then I learned about lovable.dev, an AI tool that can be used to build full fledged applications in React in a matter of seconds. So I checked that out, and with some nudging, re-prompting, and adjustments, I was able to get a great looking front-end working in a prototype sense (The AI named it DreamKeeper based on my prompts 😁).

After getting that to a satisfactory spot, I spent some time learning about Supabase (the preferred backend as a service for lovable.dev). I integrated Supabase into my OML lovable app and was able to get some of the functionality working all the way through!

I am currently in the process of getting a fully functional hosted version working so that I can test it and see what features I need to add. I’ll be sharing updates on my progress, so I wanted to do one long post about it for some context.

See you again soon!