Dev blog · #0

The story so far

Building Dagsform in public — one weekly note on what changed and why it matters.

Hi — I'm building Dagsform, a calmer to-do app for ADHD brains that matches tasks to the energy you actually have that day. This is the first entry in a weekly dev log: every week I'll pull what changed from the code, show a screenshot or two, and write the honest version of the progress. To kick it off, here's how we got to today — with a few before/afters, because the last six weeks moved fast.

It started as "Doneish"

The idea came from a simple, annoying truth: most to-do apps assume you're the same person every day. ADHD brains aren't. Some days you're sharp, some days everything is fog — and a flat list that ignores that just becomes a guilt machine. So the app was built around one loop: tell it your energy and time, and it surfaces what actually fits right now. The working name was Doneish — because "done-ish" should count.

The name had to change

Right before locking things in, a name check turned up direct collisions — another launching to-do app already owned "Doneish." Rather than fight it, I ran ~57 candidates through availability, trademark and App Store checks and landed on Dagsform: a Swedish word for the shape you're in on a given day. It says the whole concept in one word, and the domains and handles were clear.

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Six weeks of before & after

The bones were there from week one, but almost every screen has been rebuilt since. A few of my favourites:

The check-in. It always asked the two questions — your energy and your time — but early on it borrowed iOS's stock battery icons and blue accent. Now it's got its own warm look, custom energy dots, and it quietly tells you what you're usually like at this hour.

The list became a day. It started as a plain grouped list — "my todos", sorted by energy. Now there's a whole Today: an energy budget for the day, a timeline of what's waiting, and a "right now" card that surfaces the one task that matches how you feel this minute.

Focus grew up. The first focus mode was a plain gradient ring counting down. Now it's an analog pie-clock you can read at a glance, with an AI note on how long the task usually takes you — and a "Done-ish" button, because stopping early still counts.

All three platforms from day one

Dagsform runs on iPhone, iPad, Mac and Apple Watch, with the same data synced privately through your own iCloud. This week the Apple Watch app got a full nine-area test pass — check-in, energy-matched "next", starting and mirroring focus sessions between watch and phone, and the Smart Stack complication. You can start a session on your wrist and watch it show up on your phone, already running.

Testing it for real

Instead of rushing to launch, the current phase is unglamorous on purpose: I use Dagsform as my actual to-do app every day, running a two-week clock and a checklist of verifications — does the energy matching feel right, does the calibration land, does sync hold up across three devices. Bugs become issues, get fixed, and get re-checked. Seven of the nine evaluation items are already closed.

And this week: the site went live

The page you're on is new too — dagsform.app is up, the waitlist is open, and this dev blog is where the build-in-public story lives from now on. If you want to follow along, the waitlist is one email and I'll only use it to tell you when the beta opens.