Built because the tools were the work

I'm a musician, and for years my practice lived in a paper notebook: one page for the plan, another for what happened, and an argument in the margins about whether the two lined up.

Paper's fine for writing things down, terrible at arithmetic. How much had I put into a piece last month? Which weeks did I skip? Answering meant adding up a notebook by hand — an evening I usually didn't have, so mostly I didn't bother, and practiced on a vague impression instead.

So I went looking for apps, and each one had picked a half. Planners knew what I'd said I'd do, with nowhere to record what happened. Loggers and journals recorded what happened, with no idea what I'd meant to do. The metronome was a third app. Voice memos were a fourth, full of files named "New Recording 47" that remembered nothing about which session they came from. Four apps, and none of them talked to each other.

None of this is hard, exactly — it's a pile of small friction, and small friction at the start of a session is unreasonably good at becoming no session at all. I was spending real attention just keeping four tools in sync, attention meant for the playing.

Let's Shed is what I wanted instead: the plan, the clock, the click, the drone, the record I slow down, the page I read off, takes, and a journal — one app instead of four, and they actually talk to each other. Starting a goal starts a session; finishing a session ticks off the goal, without you telling it to. None of this is a feature that sounded good on a list. It's stuff I was already doing by hand, badly.

My bar was simple: open it, play, close it, without ever feeling like you're operating software. The tools shouldn't be the work.

— Will