The Color of a Day

Recently I built a productivity tool, Producktive — you can read there how it works. This note is about the part that came before: how I got to the idea in the first place.

I used to work a lot, but I saw no progress. Then I got into journaling — bullet journaling especially — and started writing down the tasks I did each day. At first just with a pen, marking the type of each entry: a square for a to-do, an “e” for an event. I wrote a lot. But it was hard to read a day at a glance, and the one thing I most wanted to know, the pages couldn’t tell me: was this a productive day, or just a busy one? I was filling pages either way.

One random day, I thought about using colors instead. I started with two: black for grunt work — the tasks I had to do but saw no value in for myself — and blue for the meaningful ones. Right away it gave me something the marks never had: I could see the balance of a day, and I had a goal I could act on — more blue.

Then I felt I needed another color. Life isn’t only about work — there are things you do just for yourself: seeing a friend, watching a movie, going for a walk. I gave those their own color, green, and the goal grew: more blue, and more green.

Red came last. Life isn’t always kind — you get sick, something goes wrong, a day just falls apart, and you can’t expect much of yourself. Red was for those days: not a failure to fix, just the truth of the day, marked and left behind.

For the first weeks, the pages came out mostly black. So I started changing how I actually spent my days — more blue meant more meaningful work, more green meant taking better care of myself. It worked. Over time, black became the minority.

I kept this up in a physical notebook for a couple of months, until I ran out of pages. I went looking for the same one and couldn’t find it; the calendars I found weren’t what I wanted. So it sat on my shopping list for a while, unresolved.

Around then I started using Claude, and within a week I could feel what it made possible: I could build the thing myself. So I did. I took the notebook and turned it into an app — Producktive. I worked it as a product first, then designed it, then wrote the code — all of it mine, end to end. And I built it the way I think products should start: small, a tight MVP, deliberately minimal so it stays easy to change later.

Of the ideas I had, this was one of the simplest — which is the point. Building something is easy now; building something with a reason to exist is the hard part, and a simple idea gives you nowhere to hide.

I’m still building it, and I’ll probably release it as an app before long. For now it’s a side project — my playground, the place I get to practice everything at once: product, design, and code. But underneath all of that, it’s still doing the one thing the notebook did for me: at the end of a month, I can look back and see, in color, what my time actually added up to. I’d love to hear what you think.