The digital world was built for rational actors.
People who wake up each morning with stable cognitive capacity, clear priorities, consistent motivation, and the calm ability to decide what matters most — and then do it, neatly, in the right order.
It’s a lovely idea. Elegant. Predictable. Very spreadsheet-friendly.
It is also complete bullshit.
No one is a rational actor. Not you. Not me. Not even the engineers and economists who came closest to modelling that ideal — and who, inconveniently, are still human too.
We are all variable, distractible, context-sensitive creatures doing our best with fluctuating attention, memory, energy, and emotional bandwidth.
And yet a remarkable amount of our software behaves as if this weren’t true.
A tough year is great at exposing bullshit
Last year was a tough year for me, for reasons I won’t go into here.
What it did do was remove my tolerance for pretending.
Even when everything else was “optimised” — sleep, fitness, routines, food, energy — my cognitive capacity still varied. Some days my brain was sharp and expansive. Other days it was slower, noisier, less cooperative.
Not broken. Just human.
And that’s when productivity tools really started to irritate me.
Why productivity tools and I have never got on
I’ve spent years around productivity. I know the systems. I know the science. I know how all this should work.
I have also never been good at lists.
Not because I’m disorganised — I’m annoyingly productive — but because my brain doesn’t think in tidy bullet points that get lovingly maintained and ticked off in sequence.
Most task managers assume you:
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enjoy breaking work into neat units
can prioritise cleanly
will keep lists beautifully up to date
and feel deep satisfaction when a little box gets a tick
I do not experience this joy.
I think in time, not lists. In days, not categories. In whether something will actually fit into a real human day that contains meetings, interruptions, and occasional existential fatigue.
Fifteen apps later, I snapped
Going into this year, I tried everything. Roughly fifteen task managers.
All good. All polished. All clearly built by smart people who find lists soothing.
I hated almost all of them.
Not because they were bad — but because they were built for a version of a human who does not exist.
So I asked a slightly petulant question:
Why can’t I have a task manager that works around me?
Building software as an act of defiance
At some point, I added up how much I was about to spend subscribing to yet another “this one will change your life” productivity tool.
And thought: Why don’t I just put that money into building the thing I actually want?
So I did.
For about six weeks — in ridiculous scraps of time before my son woke up at 6am, or in the evenings while eating dinner and half-watching TV — I started building my own.
Not as a startup. Not as a brand. As a quiet fuck you to tools that kept telling me to behave differently.
What happens when you stop pretending your brain is stable
The thing I built works because it accepts a very unfashionable truth:
Cognitive capacity varies.
Not just with sleep or energy, but with context, stress, mood, and the general chaos of being alive.
Like everyone else - some days my brain is sharp. Most days days it’s fine. But on a few days it’s fried.
That matters.
So instead of asking me to behave consistently, the system adapts to me. I click a button for my brain-state, and Work shifts. Expectations shift. Time blocks shorten when they need to. Lighter tasks surface when heavier ones would just bounce off.
And here’s the line I wish more software designers would tattoo somewhere visible:
When you stop pretending cognitive capacity is stable, task management becomes dramatically less hostile.
It turns out a lot of productivity stress is just software yelling at perfectly normal humans.
This is the rational actor fallacy — with UX
Halfway through building this, I realised this wasn’t really about task management at all.
It’s about the rational actor fallacy — but rendered in interface design.
Most of our digital world quietly assumes we are calm optimisers. When we fail to live up to that fiction, we blame ourselves.
Engineers aren’t villains here. They’re just closer to one end of the spectrum. Brilliant at abstraction, consistency, systems. Economists too.
But the rest of us have been conforming to their norms for years.
UX and accessibility designers have done heroic work softening the edges. Making things more humane.
Vibe coding lets us redesign the core.
Why vibe coding feels like a small revolution
Vibe coding removes the translation layer.
I didn’t have to persuade an engineer that my lived experience was a valid design constraint. I could just say: this is how my brain works — and build around it.
That’s the shift.
Not faster software. More representative software.
A digital world shaped not just by those who can engineer it, but by those who understand what it’s like to live inside a human brain.
So yes — I’m launching it
I’ve decided I will launch what I’ve built.
Not because the world needs another task manager — God help us — but because this one starts from a different assumption.
That you’re not broken. That your brain isn’t failing. That the tools just weren’t built for you.
If this resonates, say so in the comments or message me. I’m opening it up gradually and I’d genuinely love thoughtful feedback from people who’ve also been quietly fighting their to-do lists for years.
This isn’t a productivity manifesto.
It’s a bar-stool observation, said with a wry smile:
The world was built for rational actors.
And it’s about time we fixed that.