DayCompass
Just put it all on one goddamn screen
My brain doesn’t work like a to-do list. It works like a thunderstorm.
I used to describe it like this: my to-do list is as long as my driveway, in 8pt font. And I live at unit 4.
I’d say it at work, almost in passing, the way you toss off a joke to explain why you always look like you’re carrying more than everyone else. People laughed. I laughed too — the way you laugh at something that’s funny because it’s true, and true because it hurts a little.
It took me a long time to notice what that joke was actually doing. It wasn’t a quip about workload. It was forty-one years of being the person who held everything together, compressed into a single self-deprecating line, delivered with a smile so the room wouldn’t have to worry. The joke protected everyone from the weight of it.
Including me.
There was never an app — never a system, paper or digital — that could actually hold all of it. I tried paper for six months last year. It worked, for a while. Then the bulk of everything flying around outgrew the page, and I was back to carrying it all in my head again, with nowhere to put it down.
Here’s what that actually costs you.
I left the house at 7:45 one morning for a doctor’s appointment I was certain was on the 26th. I left my seventeen-year-old to get himself to school — which, at seventeen, with the sleep he needs, is not a small ask. I checked my phone on the way out the door. The appointment was the 29th. I’d never written it down anywhere that could’ve caught the mistake before it cost me a morning and my son a decent start to his day.
There’s a version of that story with my best friend’s engagement party in it too. I was completely oblivious. Not because I didn’t care. Because I had no system that would have told me.
That’s not forgetfulness. That’s a brain that’s been asked to hold too much for too long, with no external place to put any of it down — and the specific, physical dread of knowing there isn’t room left in there for one more thing.
What every other tool got wrong
I tried calendars. Trello. reminders and alarms on my phone. Whatever my boss had decreed that month. Monday.com. JIRA, for heaven’s sake.
None of them understood the one thing I actually needed: everything, visible, on one page, at once.
Click into a Trello card and you find a checklist hiding inside it — more things, now nested one layer deeper, that I have to remember to come back and check. Click into a JIRA defect to find the actual test case I’m meant to review. Kanban columns — Today, Backlog, Blocked — that assume my brain sorts things the way a sprint board does.
It doesn’t. I can’t time-block. I’m not a Pomodoro person. I can’t pick “just three priorities” for the day, because my brain doesn’t run on three priorities — it runs on dopamine, on whatever’s loudest right now, and pretending otherwise just adds a layer of guilt on top of the chaos.
What I actually needed was simpler and harder to find than any of that: put it all on one goddamn screen. No clicking in. No clicking back out and hoping I remember to. Just everything, visible, at the same time, so I can look at it once and know — actually know, not hope — that nothing’s been left to rattle around unwritten.
What I built instead
So I described all of that to Claude, the chaos and the failures both, and we built DayCompass — an app — a single screen that holds everything from my brain. Tasks. The things I’ve promised people. The things that aren’t urgent but are quietly troubling me in the background. Events. Done and not-done, all visible at once, nothing buried a click deep.
It took several versions to get right — by the time it could actually hold my full list, To-Dos and Dones together, it had been refined enough times that the version history is really its own story, one I’ll tell properly over in ‘CR Tracker’.
Why it’s still the one I open
I don’t need DayCompass every day. I use it every couple of days, because I know everything I’ve dumped into it is still in there, safely, whether I look at it or not.
What I do notice is a feeling — a strange, specific feeling, like my head is starting to fill up again, pressure building somewhere behind my eyes. That’s the signal. That’s when I go to DayCompass, not to add anything new, but to check: is it all still out of my brain? Is it all still there, on the page, where I put it?
It always is. That’s the whole point.
But here’s the actual point, underneath all of it, and it’s not really about my brain.
I spent years being handed tools other people had decided would work for everyone — Trello, JIRA, Monday.com, whatever app the productivity industry had most recently agreed was the answer. None of them were built for me. They were built for a generic person who doesn’t exist, and I bent myself around their logic for years because I assumed the problem was me, not the tool.
It wasn’t. I just hadn’t been able to describe what I actually needed to anyone who could build it — until I could describe it to Claude, in plain language, the way you’d explain a problem to a friend. My brain holds too much. I need to see all of it, on one screen, with nothing hidden behind a click. That’s not a technical brief. That’s just the truth, said out loud.
And out of that, in an evening, came something that didn’t just hold my to-do list. It gave me the steps — the actual, practical steps — to get everything in my life done, one piece at a time, instead of just carrying the dread of it all unsorted.
The first thing you build with AI
Your version of this won’t look like mine. It probably shouldn’t. Your first thing built with AI doesn’t have to be a to-do list at all — maybe it’s nothing like one. The point isn’t the app. The point is the moment you stop assuming the problem is you, and start describing it out loud to something that might actually be able to help.
So try it. Pick the thing that’s been nagging at you — the one you’ve never quite found the right tool for, the one you’ve just been carrying because nothing else fit. Describe it plainly, the way you’d explain it to a friend. See what comes back.
It probably won’t be perfect the first time. It might just be the first real step toward getting it done.
I still tell the driveway joke sometimes. It’s still funny, and it’s still true. But these days, it’s just a joke — not the whole weight of everything I haven’t sorted out yet.
Sandi is a Melbourne-based problem-solver, crisis-averter, and translator of the technical into the human. She spent decades being the person everyone called when something was broken, confusing, or just needed explaining properly — earning a reputation that preceded her wherever she went. Now she’s channelling that same instinct into AI: making it accessible, practical, and genuinely useful for people who think it isn’t for them.