Two ways to get organised. Both go wrong.
Build it yourself. You buy Notion so you don't need ten apps, and then you have to build them. It's a blank canvas, which is exactly why it fails for so many people: they don't want to build anything, they want functions that work. And there's nothing special about a to-do list. It's a date, a repeat, a note, a tag.
Buy every app. Meals, workouts, habits, mood, water, sleep. None of them know about each other. Each does ten times more than you need. You end up paying five to ten subscriptions for the privilege of using a tenth of each.
Go free. Anything free is harvesting your data, serving you ads, or both, to keep its lights on. You're the product.
MostliHere is the middle path: most of what you need, already built, under one skin, for one price, with apps that know about each other. It's 26 small apps. 15 are free. The other 11 are Premium - $2.99/month, or $24.99/year, with a 14-day free trial.
Four doors.
Wellness. The six health apps: workouts, meals, habits, mood, water and sleep. Simple screens that do the main job of the subscription apps you already have, the ones you're paying $5-$10 a month each to use hardly any of. They feed one Today screen.
Money. A budget, expenses with receipt photos, and savings goals. The parts of a finance app you actually use, without the bank login.
Hyper-organised. The system you'd build in Notion, finished. Scheduled tasks, a gentle backlog, habits, occasions, notes and timers, on one Today screen and one week view. Nothing to set up.
Minimalist. Real World, plus the few quiet tools around it. Fewer apps, real life first. Replace a dozen apps with one and spend the time outside.
Why it's quiet.
This is the bonus. No ads. No account. No tracking. It works offline, and all your data stays on the device. There are no notifications: you open the app, the Today screen has the things you want to get done, and you check Today - Today doesn't check you. We can't calm you down completely, but we can take the noise out of the tools.
Where it came from.
It started with a pattern I couldn't ignore.
Jonathan Haidt, on the erosion of teenage mental health. My daughters' phones lighting up every time someone posted on Snapchat or Instagram. The pressure young people carry from an online life that looks perfect while theirs doesn't. The fact that social-media companies borrow the same mechanics as the gambling industry to keep you in the feed. And my own anxiety level dropping when I cut back my feed hours.
The starting point was an attempt to aggregate social media accounts. One quiet place instead of five loud ones. It turns out this is really not possible given the pricing structures and limits on programmatic access. The platforms aren't built to let you out. The algorithm is the product. Ad revenue pays for all of it.
The platforms aren't built to let you out.
After hitting a brick wall on controlling social media feeds, another angle was needed. The core principle underlying everything is reducing engagement - allowing time to organise activities and events that are in the real world with real people.
Blue Zones - regions across the world where longevity is prevalent - share a set of common attributes. Community. Real human interactions. Frequent time in the natural environment.
Development of an app, now part of MostliHere as Mostli Real World, began. Plan real-world activities. Share them with people you already know. Nobody can find you - there's no central directory. No streaks. No alerts. If you had things planned yesterday, we just mark them as completed. It's the opposite of punitive: we assume you did everything. If you didn't, it doesn't really matter. You look forward all the time, not back.
We assume you did everything. You look forward all the time, not back.
But the bigger drain turned out to be the proliferation of disconnected apps. Most of the apps on our phones are utilities - specific functions, some simple like calculators and trackers, some more complex like task management. They don't know about each other, they ping us separately and constantly, and there's no common view even when they are date-driven.
Which is the story above. Two ways to get organised, both going wrong, and a middle path: most of what you need, already built.
Andrew
Founder, MostliHere