I Started Building an App Because I Was Afraid My Days Were Disappearing

A few years ago, I started asking myself a question that I could not answer: what is my purpose?

At that time, everything looked quite good from the outside. I had a successful career as a product manager. I was working on interesting products, earning a good salary, and doing many of the things I had once wanted to do. But I still felt that something was missing.

I did not really understand what was next. I did not know how to scale my career, how to build a life that would feel meaningful to me, or even what exactly I was trying to achieve. So I started exploring.

I read books about psychology, thinking, personal growth, and behavior. I took different courses and tried various practices. One of them suggested answering a few questions regularly over a period of time. So I started writing.

At first, it was just an exercise. But after doing it for a while, I began to notice something interesting: the questions themselves were not necessarily the most important part. The important part was that I was stopping for a few minutes and looking at my own life.

I started experimenting with different ways of doing this. Sometimes I wrote things down by hand. Sometimes I used Excel. At some point, I built a small no-code solution for myself. Sometimes I would simply think about things I was grateful for in the morning. I tried different exercises to recognize my own wins and understand how they affected my confidence.

Over time, I started seeing a pattern: reflection was changing the way I experienced time.

Normally, days can become strangely similar. You wake up, work, answer messages, go somewhere, come back home, and go to sleep. Then you do it again. A week passes. And suddenly it is Friday. You try to remember what happened during the week, and the answer is surprisingly vague. It feels like Monday and Friday were separated by five days, but you cannot really remember what happened in between.

This was one of the first effects I noticed when I started reflecting regularly: my days stopped feeling like one continuous block.

Even when nothing extraordinary happened, I started noticing the differences between them. This was the day I had an important conversation. This was the day I finally solved something that had been bothering me. This was the day I spent time with someone I care about. This was the day I made a small step toward something important. The days became more visible.

And I think this is one of the most underrated benefits of reflection. We often think about reflection as something we do to analyze ourselves or become more productive. But sometimes its simplest value is much more basic: it helps us actually experience our own lives.

When you regularly stop and ask yourself what happened today, what was meaningful, what went well, or what you are grateful for, your life starts to have more texture. You begin to remember it.

And once I started seeing this effect, I became interested in what else could happen if reflection was made more systematic. I collected questions from books and psychological practices. I experimented with different formats. I thought about which questions were actually useful and which ones only created more work.

Eventually, I built a simple no-code prototype of what would later become Bank of Todays — a rough version, stitched together on a no-code platform, nowhere close to a real app yet. I used it myself for several months.

And then, in a very unglamorous way, the experiment stopped working. The platform reached its limits for storing images. There were no proper reminders. The system was not really designed for what I was trying to create.

But by that point, I had already learned something more important than how to build the tool: the value was not in storing my thoughts somewhere. The value was in creating a reason to stop.

That distinction became very important to me. I do not think people necessarily need another place to collect information about themselves. We already have enough apps that store our photos, notes, tasks, messages, and memories.

What many of us need is a small structure that helps us make time for reflection. Something that reminds us to pause. Something simple enough to become a habit. Something that helps us notice what is happening in our lives while it is still happening.

Because the interesting effects usually do not appear after one day. They accumulate. After the first week, you may simply notice that the days no longer completely blend together. After a few weeks, you may start seeing patterns in your thoughts, decisions, and behavior. Over time, you may start noticing your own progress in a way that is difficult to see when you are constantly looking forward.

And something else happens too: you start noticing your wins.

This sounds simple, but I think it has a powerful effect on how we see ourselves. Most people are much better at remembering what went wrong than what went right. We remember the unfinished task, the difficult conversation, the mistake, the thing we should have done better. Our progress is often invisible to us because we are already focused on the next problem.

Regularly recognizing your own wins creates a different kind of evidence. You start seeing that you are actually moving. That you handled something difficult. That you made a decision you had been avoiding. That you took a small step forward. That you did more than you thought.

Over time, this can change the way you see yourself — not because someone told you to be more confident, but because you have started collecting your own evidence.

This is what eventually led to Bank of Todays — the app I am building now.

The goal is not to create a digital diary where you spend 30 minutes writing about your day. It is much simpler than that. I want to create a small space that makes reflection easier to practice consistently — a place where you can pause for a few minutes, answer a few meaningful questions, and move on with your day.

The questions may evolve over time. There may be different practices, challenges, or additional prompts. I am still experimenting with what makes the system genuinely useful. But the core idea is already clear to me: the reflection is the product. The app is just the place that makes the reflection easier to do.

I believe this is also why I want the basic version of Bank of Todays to be free. You should not have to believe in the idea before trying it. You should be able to experience the effect yourself.

Try it for a week. Take a few minutes every day and write down what happened. Notice your wins. Notice what you are grateful for. Notice what you are thinking about. Then look back.

Maybe you will discover something about yourself. But even if you do not, I think there is a good chance you will notice one small thing: Monday will no longer feel exactly like Friday. The week will have a shape. The days will have their own stories.

And maybe that is where reflection begins — not with trying to find your purpose or redesign your entire life, but with simply becoming more aware of the life that is already happening.