Why orday

Why this matters now

We're living in an attention war.

Every app on your phone is engineered to steal your time. Short videos that auto-play into the next one. Feeds that never end. Notifications designed by people whose job is to make you tap.

Fifteen seconds. That's what they've trained us for. Fifteen seconds of entertainment, then the next hit. Scroll. Swipe. Repeat. Hours disappear.

They call it brain rot. I don't think that's dramatic.

Our attention spans are being shredded. The ability to sit with one thing, to do deep work, to be bored long enough to think—it's becoming rare. And it's not an accident. It's a business model.

This is why planning matters more than ever.

Not productivity hacks. Not "10x your output." Just the simple act of deciding, in advance, what deserves your attention tomorrow.

Planning is how you put blinders on. It's how you wake up with intention instead of reaching for your phone and letting the algorithms decide your morning. It's how you take back control.

Without a plan, you're driftwood. The current takes you wherever it wants.

Nothing works

Paper notebooks? I tried. Bullet journals, daily planners, the fancy ones with the ribbon bookmarks. They work—until you leave them at home. Or at the office. Or forget to bring them to the coffee shop. A system that only works when you remember to carry it isn't a system.

Task lists? They just keep piling up. You add three things, finish one, add five more. The list grows. It never shrinks. It becomes a graveyard of things you once thought mattered. You stop looking at it.

Calendars? Great for time blocking. Terrible for tasks. I can block "Deep Work 9-11am" but the calendar doesn't know what I'm working on. The tasks live somewhere else—in a list, in my head, scattered across apps. Disconnected.

So I have tasks in one place and time in another, and they never meet. I look at my to-do list and think "when am I even getting to these?" I look at my calendar and see empty blocks that somehow fill up with nothing.

The apps get fancier—tags, filters, priorities, projects, subtasks, recurring tasks, integrations, AI suggestions—but underneath, it's still the same broken model. Tasks over here. Time over there. And me in the middle, guessing.

None of them answer the questions that actually matter:

• When am I going to do this?
• How long will it take?
• Am I being realistic about today?
• Where did my time actually go?

I'd end each day with a vague sense of failure. I did stuff. But did I do what mattered? I couldn't tell you.

The night before

Not in the morning, when your inbox is already screaming. Not in your head, where it gets lost. The night before, when the day is done and tomorrow is still a blank page.

Five minutes. You look at tomorrow. You decide what matters. You give it a time.

Then you close the app and rest.

When morning comes, there's no decision fatigue. No scrambling. No "what should I do first?" The plan is waiting. You just start.

It changed everything for me.

But I couldn't find an app that did this well.

The gap

Here's the other thing no to-do app does: track reality.

You plan to work on the report at 9am. But did you? Or did you start at 11 after clearing emails? You planned one hour. Did it take one hour, or three?

Most of us have no idea. The day happens, and it's gone. We never see the patterns.

I wanted to know:

• Which tasks always take longer than I think
• What time of day I do my best work
• How often I skip the things I say matter
• Where my time actually goes

Not to beat myself up. Just to see the truth.

So I built orday

I couldn't find what I wanted, so I'm building it.

Each evening, you design tomorrow. You drag tasks into time slots. You see exactly what your day will hold. Then you're done.

During the day, you tap to start a task. Tap when it's done. That's it. No timers in your face. No friction.

orday tracks the gap between what you planned and what actually happened. Over time, you see the patterns. You learn how you actually work.