Mental health is important. Managing data is important. People with mental health issues struggle with aspects of their day-to-day life, which includes the normal tasks that everyone completes in a day.

Mental health is a big area. There are a lot of apps, services, and otherwise growing interest in this field. These apps and services tend to record mood, help identify triggers, learn skills, and more.

Similarly, there are many task-management and todo apps out there. Beyond task management apps, there are also offerings like Notion and Obsidian that offer general personal data management.

Despite this interest, there are some concerns.

• https://mental.jmir.org/2021/8/e29368
  • What to do from mood logging? Mood loggers tend to only record data, not act on it.
• https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2023/08/mental-health-ills-are-rising-do-mood-tracking-apps-help/
  • Hard to get long-term adherence to mood reporting
  • Data will by spotty
  • Gap in management
  • Mental health 'advice' tends to be terrible
• Todo apps are problematic
  • Tend to be a top-down approach: Think of tasks, predict how long they take, and add them to a fixed schedule for a day
  • Tend to be enterprise-centric (e.g., meant for workplaces)
  • Don't offer chances to reflect on past work or things

Capitalistic ventures are inherently incompatible with mental health. We need an open source approach

• Not profit-driven
• Grants data sovereignty. We do not need to keep data. We mustn't sell data.
• Not out to hook, “trap” people into a service (no 'lock-in')
• Not out to score high app usage. Instead, plan for absences from the app

Managing personal life for everyone, but particularly for neuro-divergent people. This will be done by:

• Easy data input
• Tolerates long, sporadic absences (think big gaps in data)
• Allows logging to range from detailed to broad
• Provides information for therapy, doctors visits
• Helps people make realistic plans for themselves via a bottom-up approach

It’s an app that helps people manage their personal lives via user input. The app prioritizes fast and scalable data input. The user progresses on a journey of light data entry to detailed reports on what matters to them most. As the user enters data, they will be given opportunities to roll-up, or group together related entries to form:

• Habits to form
• Habits to break or lessen (e.g., drinking)
• Longer-term projects, "deliverables"
• Triggers

• User opens the app
• User logs a previous period
  • Few hours
  • Days
  • Weeks
  • Years
• In log, user states:
  • What happened in this period
  • Time breakdown (if desired)
  • Mood tracking (if desired)
  • etc.
• Logs can contain as little or as much information as needed
• User can revisit past logs to add information as necessary
  • Create habits from past logs to track
    • E.g., track medication adherence,
  • Create long-term projects, other deliverables

An app that prioritize easy data entry with scalable schemas that evolve over time. This means an UX emphasis in regards to data entry.

Schemas vary over time

Easy x

• Time and place
• After the fact