u/Frequent-Football984

Hi everyone,

I'm Marian, founder of SelfManager.ai, a date-based AI task manager in the productivity space.

Quick background on the product:

• Started in 2016 as a side project, launched publicly in late 2022
• Almost full-time since 2024, currently on v5 with 11 AI features
• Enterprise-grade backend, multi-region, offline-first sync
• Subscription-based (monthly and annual)

Individual plan:
$8/month - $72/annual
Team plan
$30/month - $300 annual

I am looking for a digital marketing agency to fund and manage paid ads in return of 50% the revenue that is generated.

Proposed starting point for the deal:

• The agency funds and manages the ad spend
• Lifetime share 50% of subscription revenue - until all customers brought by you are subscribed
• Open to negotiating the structure, duration, and split

Channel-wise there are no restrictions - Meta, Google, Reddit, TikTok, YouTube, whatever the agency thinks fits best.
Ideal partner is US or EU based with SaaS or subscription experience.

If this sounds interesting, send me a DM - not sure if I am allowed to share my email here

I run three small online businesses. A freelance coding agency, a productivity app I've been building since 2016, and a regional viral content site. Plus YouTube and social on top of all of it.

Most of my day is on a MacBook(90%) and iPhone(10%). Clients, code, marketing, journaling, money - it all lives digitally.
Which means every week generates a lot of context that no memory can hold onto.

For years my weekly review was the one thing that kept all of this from drifting.
When I did it, I caught contracts going cold, code projects slipping, marketing wasted on the wrong things.
When I skipped, things went sideways slowly enough that I didn't notice for a month.

Problem was, a manual review took me about an hour.
Scrolling through every day in my date-based task app, re-reading journal entries, looking at what I shipped vs what I billed vs what I didn't finish.
By the time I was done, Sunday night was already gone.
Most weeks I'd find a reason to skip.

What changed: I started using AI to read my own data and give me a report for the week.
Not a generic chatbot, it reads my tasks, priorities, status, time tracking, journaling, comments, notes.

I scan the report, then ask follow-ups in plain English.

After 9 months of doing it this way, here's what I changed my mind about.
The people who stick with weekly reviews aren't more disciplined.
They have lower-friction setups.
The habit isn't held together by willpower.
It's held together by how cheap it is to start.

The week you're busiest is the week you most need the review, and also the week you have the least energy for it.
If your setup costs energy to start, you'll skip. If it costs 30 seconds, you'll do it.

For anyone here running multiple things at once - what does your weekly review look like? Manual, AI-assisted, or skipping it half the time like I used to?

When I started building my own task manager back in 2016, I honestly didn't know the space was crowded. I knew Trello, Asana, and the default notes app on my phone. That was it. I was just building something I wished existed.

I worked on it slowly in my free time and quietly launched a simple version in 2022. Pre-AI, no fancy features.

It wasn't until 2024, when I finally got around to marketing, that I saw how massive this space actually is.
Not just Notion and ClickUp - hundreds of apps. Indie planners, AI to-do apps, second-brain tools, ADHD-specific apps, calendar-first apps. Every week another launch.

But the more I looked, the more I realized these apps aren't really competing with each other.

They're solving different problems.

Team coordination (Asana, ClickUp).
Notes and second brain (Notion, Obsidian).
Fast capture (Todoist, Things).
Calendar-first time blocking (Sunsama, Motion).
Self-management - planning, reviews, habits - which is the one I cared about.

From the outside they all look like task apps.
From the inside they're built for completely different brains.

So the market isn't oversaturated. It's just badly mapped.

Most people haven't found the shape of tool that fits how they actually work.

What's your take on the current market for "task apps"?

All my acquaintances and I no longer use Upwork because there is no work for us there.

Curious if there are web designers/developers who still get good jobs there

Hard to find a digital space AI hasn't touched, but productivity feels like one of the bigger shifts.

For me, the change wasn't a new app. It was AI removing friction from the boring stuff.

Weekly reviews used to be a chore I skipped half the time. Now I do them with AI in about 10 minutes and they actually stick.

Curious what changed for you?

I do my weekly review every Sunday night, after everything for the week is done.

I started doing this years ago, not because I'm naturally disciplined, but because reviewing was the one thing that consistently pulled me out of bad periods.
Whenever I got stuck - low motivation, scattered focus, weeks blending into nothing - sitting down to look at what actually happened was what got me unstuck.

So I made it a routine. Sunday night, every week, no exceptions.

The hard part wasn't the value of the review. I already knew it worked.
The hard part was the friction. Pulling everything together, remembering what I did Monday by the time Sunday came around, looking through scattered notes - it was tedious enough that I started skipping weeks.
And the moment I skipped weeks, the drift came back.

What changed in the last year is that I started using AI to do the heavy lifting.

I journal during the day - what I worked on, what I decided, what was on my mind, sometimes just one line per task.
By Sunday night, I select the week and get a full review back in under a minute.
Not a list of completed tasks.
An actual summary of how the week went, what I shifted on, what kept getting postponed and why.

Then I follow up with questions:

• Has anything else happened?
• How was my personal life?
• What wins have I made professionally?

The cadence stuck because the friction is gone.
I do weekly, monthly, and quarterly now.

The quarterly reviews are the most surprising - after a few months of logged context, the patterns are obvious in a way memory can't show you.

The point isn't the AI. The point is that the review habit is what kept me accountable, and removing the friction made it sustainable.

If you've fallen off weekly reviews, my honest take: it's almost never about discipline.
It's about friction.
Find a way to lower it and the habit returns on its own.

The app that I am using organizes data by date(day), and I'm doing daily planning every day.

So the AI has a rich context about my tasks, their priorities, and status.
As well as all actions I took on that data.
And the comments section I use it to journal what was going on during that day - what tasks can not explain by themselves.

I remember what Sam Ovens said, that our memory has limits and we forget easily small but important details. Using a digital system for storage is a great way to overcome our memory limits, rewind and make better decisions.

My conclusion is that you need a system that records your major activities so when you review them, you have rich data.

Have you guys seen benefits of doing periodic reviews? For me they were critical

I do my weekly review every Sunday night, after everything for the week is done.

I started doing this years ago, not because I'm naturally disciplined, but because reviewing was the one thing that consistently pulled me out of bad periods.
Whenever I got stuck - low motivation, scattered focus, weeks blending into nothing - sitting down to look at what actually happened was what got me unstuck.

So I made it a routine. Sunday night, every week, no exceptions.

The hard part wasn't the value of the review. I already knew it worked.
The hard part was the friction. Pulling everything together, remembering what I did Monday by the time Sunday came around, looking through scattered notes - it was tedious enough that I started skipping weeks.
And the moment I skipped weeks, the drift came back.

What changed in the last year is that I started using AI to do the heavy lifting.

I journal during the day - what I worked on, what I decided, what was on my mind, sometimes just one line per task.
By Sunday night, I select the week and get a full review back in under a minute.
Not a list of completed tasks.
An actual summary of how the week went, what I shifted on, what kept getting postponed and why.

Then I follow up with questions:

• Has anything else happened?
• How was my personal life?
• What wins have I made professionally?

The cadence stuck because the friction is gone.
I do weekly, monthly, and quarterly now.

The quarterly reviews are the most surprising - after a few months of logged context, the patterns are obvious in a way memory can't show you.

The point isn't the AI. The point is that the review habit is what kept me accountable, and removing the friction made it sustainable.

If you've fallen off weekly reviews, my honest take: it's almost never about discipline.
It's about friction.
Find a way to lower it and the habit returns on its own.

The app that I am using organizes data by date(day), and I'm doing daily planning every day.

So the AI has a rich context about my tasks, their priorities, and status.
As well as all actions I took on that data.
And the comments section I use it to journal what was going on during that day - what tasks can not explain by themselves.

I remember what Sam Ovens said, that our memory has limits and we forget easily small but important details. Using a digital system for storage is a great way to overcome our memory limits, rewind and make better decisions.

My conclusion is that you need a system that records your major activities so when you review them, you have rich data.

Have you guys seen benefits of doing periodic reviews? For me they were critical

Every week someone asks "what's the best daily planning app?" and the replies are chaos because people are comparing tools that don't even solve the same problem.

After spending way too much time in this space, I think the category has split into 5 clear types in 2026. Picking the right one matters more than picking the "best" one.

1. To-do list apps - Todoist, TickTick, Microsoft To Do, Apple Reminders, Any.do.

Fast capture. Great if your main problem is remembering things. Weak when your day needs structure beyond a list.

2. Calendar-first planners - Google Calendar, Outlook, Akiflow, Morgen.

Time is the unit. Great if your day is mostly meetings and fixed commitments. Feels rigid for messy creative work.

3. AI auto-schedulers - Motion, Reclaim, SkedPal.

The app decides where tasks go. Great if you want automation and your work breaks cleanly into estimated blocks. Frustrating if you want assistance, not a robot owning your calendar.

4. Guided daily ritual apps - Sunsama is the clearest example.

Slows you down, makes you plan intentionally, ends with a shutdown routine. Great if you overcommit. Weak if your notes, context, and review live in 5 other apps.

5. Productivity home bases - tools like SelfManager.ai (full disclosure: I build this one), and arguably where Notion, Trello, and ClickUp tried to land but got bloated.

Tasks, deadlines, time tracking, notes, comments, planning, and review live in one place around the day itself.

What do you think about these 5 categories?
Are you using multiple apps, or is one enough for your schedule?

Most posts about productivity systems are written within weeks of someone discovering them.

Mine is the opposite.

I want to share what's stayed after almost a decade of using and reshaping the same system.

Why I started

In my early freelancing years I didn't keep records. I thought to-do lists were for people who didn't have real work. Some months were great, some were rough, and I had no way to explain the difference to myself.

The shift came after a bad stretch. I started flipping through the few pages of notes and lists I'd kept. I wasn't looking for tasks. I was looking for an explanation.
Why did the previous month go so well? Why did this one feel off?

The good periods had records. The bad ones didn't. That single observation became the seed of everything that came after.

What's survived all 9 years

A few things haven't changed since the first month I started doing this seriously.

Dating everything. Every list, every note, every quick capture gets a date.
A list without a date is just a list.
A list with a date is a record.
This is the rule I've never broken.

Three sources, not one. I keep a daily to-do list, a paper notebook for notes, and a separate calendar for future planning.
They don't overlap.
The to-do list is what I'm doing today.
The notes page is what I'm thinking.
The calendar is what I'm aiming at.
Trying to merge them into one always ends badly.

A sentence at the top of each day. Just one.
Not a quote from a book, usually a note to myself.
Sets the tone before any task gets done. Days I skip this are demonstrably worse.

Inputs as discipline.
I curated who I followed online years ago - about 10% close friends, 90% accounts pointed at where I wanted to grow.
What you see every day shapes who you become.
The most underrated change I ever made.

What I've learned across 9 years

The system is small. The discipline is in keeping it consistent, not in adding more.

Most productivity advice optimizes for output. The actual unlock is visibility. When you can see your patterns clearly, improvement becomes possible without willpower. When you can't, you're guessing.

Tools matter less than I thought. I've used pen and paper, three different apps, and eventually built my own digital version(let me know in comments if you want to see it). The structure is what mattered, not the medium.

Reviews are the leverage point.
The to-do list is just capture.
The notebook is for storing ideas.
The forward calendar is just intention.
The compound interest is in the looking-back and seeing at what exact day(date) they happened, the comparing of weeks and months, the noticing of what conditions made good periods good.

For anyone who's been at this for a while: what's stayed in your system through everything else changing?
What did you think was essential five years ago that now feels obviously wrong?

Genuine question, would love to hear how others think about this.

I shipped a full redesign of my productivity app a week ago.(App is a Date-based AI Task Manager)

Some additional features, same logic, same flows.

Just a much more professional UI and tighter visual hierarchy.
The conversion lift was bigger than I expected.

People on Reddit told me a while back to improve the design a lot. But I left it for later and focused on new features.

It got me curious about how other people actually weigh design when choosing a productivity tool.

The functional stuff (capture speed, sync, AI features, integrations) feels like the obvious answer.

But I'm starting to think design might be doing more heavy lifting than people admit.

Have you abandoned an app that did everything you needed but felt ugly?

I launched an unprepared v3, 3 weeks ago, and didn't get any traffic from it.

Since then, a major update v4.3.0 was made, a full redesign + significant features that were all planned and worked on for 1 year. And I want to launch it on PH.

I just get the basic response that my request not approved and they keep mentioning in the message my v3 launch as not being approved. They might not have even listed my v3 launch since I got 0 visits from them.

I have been trying for 1 week to get in touch with a human from them and even their hello email doesn't work. Gmail fails to send a message. The only response I get is from their retarded AI.

Has anybody been in a similar situation? What are my options?

A lot of entrepreneurs seem to use a stack of tools to stay organized:

Calendar for appointments and events
Slack or Teams for communication
Notion for notes
Todoist or TickTick for tasks
Trello, Asana, or ClickUp for projects
ChatGPT or Claude for AI help

I’m curious how this works in real life.

Do you prefer having separate tools for separate parts of your life(personal and business), or have you found one main system that handles most of it?

Also curious about the cost side.

Roughly how much are you spending per month on productivity, planning, project management, notes, AI, and tools that help you run your business and personal life?

My own path went in the opposite direction.

I started with a pen-and-paper date-based system in 2014 to keep up with my freelancing work.

In 2016, I started building a digital version as a side project.
I launched an early version publicly in 2022.
Then in 2024 I went all in after I saw people getting interested in it.

Now it is the only productivity system I personally rely on for personal life, client work, agency work, content, and developing the app itself.

For me, having one place works better because business and personal life do not really happen in separate realities. They all compete for the same days, the same time, and the same energy.

But I know many people prefer a stack because each tool is better at one specific job.

So I’m curious:

What is your current productivity stack?
Do you use one main system or many apps?
And what is your rough monthly cost for all of it?