Personal project
Night Schedule
A four-part night routine that lives on my phone, and the story of cutting the best-looking feature in it.
Role
Design and build, solo
For
Me, nightly
Surface
Mobile web, on the home screen
Built with
One HTML file, Cloudflare Pages
The problem
The plan only existed in my head
Every night I wanted to do the same four things: practise communication and storytelling, read, meditate, journal. Ninety minutes, give or take. But the plan lived nowhere, so each evening opened with the same negotiation. Which one, for how long, am I actually doing this tonight. The negotiation usually won.
Habit apps were the wrong size for the problem. I didn't need help building a habit. I needed the four things already decided, and something to tell me when to stop.
Assumptions
Three guesses. One was right.
Right
The hard part is choosing, not doing.
Four things on one screen, each with a time already set. Nothing left to decide. That's the whole app, really.
Wrong
Seeing the timer will make me stop.
It doesn't. It just tells me the time is up. I still start storytelling and look up three hours later.
Wrong
A 21-day streak will keep me going.
It did the opposite. I had to build it to find that out.
The build
Two screens, and that's the app
Pick a thing. Tap the dial. That's the entire interaction model. Everything else is restraint.
A session. The title, one line on why it's worth doing, and a dial you tap to start. Chips set the length; they remember what you picked last time.
A finished night. Four ticks and a full ring. No congratulations, no confetti. The app just quietly stops asking.
The ring empties, it doesn't fill.
You watch what's left, not what you've spent. Time remaining is the thing you actually care about at 11pm.
The dial is the button.
Tap the circle to start, tap it again to pause. One enormous target, nothing else to hit in a dark room.
The night runs until 4am.
A session started at 12:30 counts for the evening before, because that's how nights work, whatever the date says.
The illustrations carry it.
Same girl in all four, watercolour, slightly wobbly frames, a pencil permanently lost in her hair. She is the reason I open this instead of a stopwatch.
Try it
It's right here
The real app, running. Tap a card, tap the dial, watch the ring go down. Nothing you do here touches my own record.
A live copy. It can't write to my actual record.
What I cut
The prettiest feature was the one making things worse
I built a 21-day tracker: a 7×3 grid under the cards, one cell per day, darker the more of that night you finished. Tonight got a black ring. Tap any past day and it told you what you'd done. It was easily the nicest-looking thing in the app.
Removed after about a week. Eight full nights out of twelve looks like progress on paper. It did not feel like progress.
It measured a completion I was never going to hit. I'd start the first session and still be at it three hours later, which meant most nights ended somewhere short of four. So the grid stopped being a record and became a wall of near-misses. A calm app quietly turning into a report card.
The fix wasn't to redesign it. The feature was answering a question I hadn't actually asked. It's gone; the nightly ticks stayed.
The data still gets recorded in the background, backed up off the phone. If I ever want to look at it, it's there. It just isn't on screen every night, making a case against me.
Where it stands
What it actually does for me
The negotiation is gone. Four decisions, made once, sitting on my home screen. That alone was worth the build, and it's the part I'd keep if I could only keep one thing.
The long session still runs long. A chime isn't a strong enough ending, and that's the next real problem to solve. Something harder to ignore than a sound, rather than a chart telling me afterwards that I failed.
And I open it because it's nice to look at. Two weeks in, that's not a soft feature. It's most of why the thing survived at all.
Every screen
All five of them
One night, start to finish. There is nothing else in the app.
Tonight, half done
Running
Time's up
All four
And it's very cute
Four nights of one girl's life
Talking to a room, reading with two cats, sitting with the incense going, writing the whole day down. The countdown label says FOCUS BABY. That was never going to be changed to something sensible.
night-schedule-ep4.pages.dev
Still open on my phone every night.