logbook is a daily tracking app with a single constraint: no gamification. No streaks, no badges, no push notifications telling you you’ve slipped. Just a quiet place to note what happened and how things felt.
It started as a personal tool — a plain-text file I’d update every evening. The app is an attempt to formalize that practice without ruining what made it work.
Why I built this
Every habit tracker I tried eventually became a source of anxiety. The streak counter was supposed to motivate. Instead it became something to protect — a number to avoid breaking, a pressure that made me dread opening the app.
When I broke a streak, I’d often abandon the habit entirely. The tool had inverted its purpose.
logbook has no streaks. There’s nothing to protect. You can skip a week and come back without ceremony. The only record is your own.
Design decisions
The interface is deliberately sparse. One screen per day. A text field. An optional mood marker. Done. The history view is a simple calendar — tapped days show their entry, untapped days are just blank squares. No charts. No trends. No insight engine.
I’m not opposed to analytics, but I wanted to see if the practice was useful without them first. It is. Knowing what you did and how you felt, without being told what it means — turns out that’s often enough.
Current status
The first build is running on my own phone and a handful of TestFlight users. It’s stable but incomplete — the history view needs work and there’s no export yet.
Planning an App Store release sometime in Q2 2026.