Why I Built Solarhringr

I got called lazy a lot. Teachers, bosses, family. After hearing it enough you stop arguing with it and just adopt the word yourself, which is worse.

The confusing part was that I wasn't lazy in any way that made sense. I could sink twelve hours into a project that had my interest and forget to eat. Then a 30 second text message would sit on my list for three weeks while I did basically anything else to avoid it. Nobody had an explanation for that, including me. Lazy was just the word that got used.

I was in my late 40's before anyone said the letters ADHD to me. Getting the diagnosis late in life is a strange experience. There's relief, and then there's this long ugly stretch of looking back at your whole life with the correct label finally in hand, re-reading every "he doesn't apply himself" with real understanding of what held me back.

Anyways... Once I knew what it was, I did what every newly diagnosed adult does... I tried to fix it... with apps... a lot of apps.

The part where the apps don't work

I tried a lot of them. To-do lists, calendar apps, time blocking, the fancy planners with morning rituals built in. Some of them are genuinely well made. Doesn't matter. They all died on me the same way.

They assume you show up every day. They assume a list of forty tasks is helpful information and not a wall you bounce off of. And when you fall off for a few days, which you will, they make sure you know it. Overdue tasks in red. Broken streaks. Yesterday's failures carried forward like a bill collector. The app starts to feel like one more person who's disappointed in me, so I quit opening it. Then I get to feel bad about quitting, too.

If your brain works like mine you already know this loop. The thing that's supposed to help becomes another thing you're failing at.

At some point it clicked that the problem wasn't effort. These tools are built around assumptions my brain simply doesn't meet. Waiting around for somebody to build one that worked for me wasn't working, so I started building it myself.

What I actually built

Quick context: I'm not a software company. I run a crew at a refinery in small-town Alberta, twelve hour shifts, and I taught myself to code around them. This got built in the evenings and on days off.

I named it Solarhringr, an old Norse word for the sun's full circle. One whole day. That's really the thing I needed help with, seeing a day. Time blindness is real and no list view fixes it.

The design is just my own failures, inverted.

Capturing comes before organizing. When a thought shows up I only have a few seconds before it's gone, so there's one box, always right there. Type it. Figure out later if it's a task or just an idea. Ideas go in a vault and stay there. My old apps mostly lost my thoughts, not my tasks.

Nothing shames you. A task you didn't get to just rolls forward quietly. No red badge, no streak counter, no pile of accusations waiting at the top of the screen. The day ended, that's all. Sounds soft. It's the entire reason I still open the app on the bad weeks.

There's a button for being stuck, because "just start" has never once worked on me. It asks what kind of stuck you are first. Overwhelmed is different from "this task is too big," which is different from "I don't know what the next step even is," which is different from having no energy left. Each one gets different help.

And your data stays yours. No ads, no tracking, nothing sold, no AI reading your tasks. A planner ends up holding your actual life. I'm not interested in harvesting that from anyone.

Where it's at

It's in beta now. Works on a phone or a desktop, installs like a regular app. I use it every day myself, it's how I planned the shifts and evenings that built it, which keeps me honest about what's annoying. A tester asked for a feature last week and it shipped the same day. That's the upside of one guy and a short feedback loop.

It's not done. The roadmap on the site is public and honest about what's real and what isn't yet.

If any of this sounds like the inside of your head, the beta is open by invite. There's a request form at solarhringr.com. Tell me a bit about what brings you and I'll send you a key.

For most of my life I figured the problem was me. Turned out a lot of it was the tools. If you've got a drawer full of abandoned planners somewhere, this one was built by a guy with the same drawer.

— Les
Goatface Tech, Sundre, Alberta