u/Kitchen-Rock-5847

Not affiliated with David. Long-time reader, built this for me.

I've been listening Never Finished audiobook for the last two weeks and wanted a way to apply it day to day instead of just nodding along in the car. So I started building a small app for myselfbased on a book.

The whole thing is built around the Oath. You type the reason you're doing this, in your own words, before you can do anything else. No edits after submit. Every time you try to quit, the Oath shows up first and you have to sit with it for 10 seconds before you can bail.

Around the Oath:

- Mission Log: ROGER THAT or FAILURE. No partial credit.
- The Mirror: every excuse you log gets timestamped. After a week you read your own pattern.
- Inner Bitch Alarm: record your own excuses. Tomorrow your own voice is your 4am alarm.

Screenshots below. Personal experiment, not a launch. Curious whether any of this would actually work on you.

Stay hard.

i've been trying to get consistent with two things: a daily morning workout and a writing habit for about two years. every january i pick a new app, every march i'm back to a paper notebook on my desk. the apps i keep cycling through:

- streak-based ones (habitica, streaks, way of life). lose the streak once, lose interest in the app within 3 days.
- the newer AI coach apps. too much chatter, asks me how i feel, tries to "reframe" the missed day. i don't want a therapist, i want a checklist and goals.
- notion / bullet-journal style setups. i end up tweaking the template more than doing the habits.

paper works because it doesn't ask anything of me. write the date, write the goal, X or empty box. no congratulating, no "you can do it tomorrow!" copy, no excuses softened into reframes. but paper is bad at reminding me of my goals when my focus slips.

what i'm looking for is basically a app where set a goal and for each task in a day to see if this helps me move towards to goal. if i fail the task, i want to know what excuse i have told to myself on why i skipped. because those excuses are so silly that i don't want to be that person. that's the whole feature set. no AI, no points, no flames, no encouragement copy. assume i'm an adult.

does this exist? or is everyone here also back on paper? or i should build one for myself?

Been listening to Never Finished. Made a hard-core goal tracker that makes you swear an oath to yourself and stick to it. What do you think?

i keep falling back to paper. is there actually a minimal habit/discipline app out there?