It started with my towels and ended up managing our home.

I log tasks and limits several times a day, so opening their pages each time became tedious. I wanted the things I did every day within one scroll and one interaction, even if that meant Home was a bit crowded.

That meant some duplication. For a Limit, I wanted enough state to understand the allowance and a quick way to add to it. History and configuration could stay on the Limits page. Tasks on Home could help me act on what needed attention, while the Tasks page kept the larger working set.

I could have made Home a summary with links into each feature, but then I'd keep paying for that tidy structure every time I wanted to log something. I accepted a denser dashboard because I wanted to do the common things where I already was.

I kept coming back to the idea of a common hub for Tasks, Limits and the other logs. They had quite a lot in common underneath, especially timestamps and histories, so it seemed like there should be a way to bring them together. Each attempt mostly felt like I'd put several features next to each other.

Logging a drink takes almost no thought, but a Task might need me to decide whether to do it now or leave it. With an illness, I might want to write quite a bit about what happened.

A Limit also needs to show how the week is going after I add something. An illness entry might need a photo or a medicine dose. I still wanted to reuse code where it helped. I think the shared schema fooled me into thinking the UI should be shared too.

At one point, my rough order of use was Tasks, then Limits, Meals, Prices, Illness, Expiry, Gym and Growing Up. That order can change, but there's a long tail of features I use much less often.

I had to get used to giving them uneven amounts of space. Something could be important and still not deserve a permanent Home card. Meanwhile, something completely mundane could deserve a spot right there because I did it several times a day.

Tasks was a useful example. I used it a lot, but because I could do so much from Home, I had less reason to open the Tasks page itself. Another feature might deserve a navigation slot simply because I actually needed to open its page.

I had structured symptoms in the illness tracker because I thought they'd be useful to compare later. But when my son was unwell, I often just wanted to record what I'd noticed. Something like a small ulcer under his tongue the night before, then a painful sore on his foot in the morning, although he otherwise seemed well.

Choosing symptom categories felt like too much work. I could write down what I saw without having to decide exactly what to call it. Temperature and medicine timings were different because those were already specific things I wanted to record.

A photo could help me see how something had changed, while a doctor's note kept what had been assessed or advised. Those were useful things to capture in their own forms. Structured symptoms might still be useful later. But when my son was unwell, categorizing everything while I was trying to record what happened was just annoying.

So I made Note the first action in Add an update, with structured symptoms still available alongside it. I could write the observation down immediately and use the more specific inputs when I needed them.

When I wanted to record sleepwalking, I already had Tasks and Illness in Cubby. It would have been convenient to put the episode into whichever existing feature was closest, but neither felt like a convincing fit. An unusual observation didn't automatically belong in an illness record.

A generic event log would have lost the sleep context too. I wanted to keep an episode with the night it happened, alongside sleep and wake times. Naps and patterns across nights also made more sense together, so Sleep got its own model.

That still left a separate question about where it should appear. Sleep could have its own proper record without automatically earning a card on Home or a prime navigation slot.

Tasks could have been divided up according to their dates and statuses. But when I opened the page, I was usually working out what to deal with soon and what I'd already let slip. The things I could leave until later needed somewhere to sit too.

I settled on Today & Tomorrow, Delayed, and Backlog. Those headings did some of the interpretation I'd otherwise have to do each time I scanned the dates. I could see the kind of decision I needed to make before reading every item.

Time was a connection I actually wanted across Cubby. Medicine timings could sit near illness observations, and a day could include meals as well as a workout. I wanted to see what had just happened and what was coming up, which gave Timeline a purpose that the common hub had struggled to find.

I considered making it the main screen, but chronology couldn't decide everything that deserved my attention. An overdue Task or a frequently used Limit could matter more than whichever event happened to come next.

I kept a compact Timeline on Home, with a full view when I wanted more detail. It tells me roughly where we are in the day without turning Home into a chronological feed.

For a while, a card was the obvious way to contain each thing on Home. It separated the information neatly and made a component easy to move around. But once I had enough of them, the white rounded cards on tinted sections started to look like stickers on coloured paper.

Each card seemed reasonable on its own. Together, they gave too many things the same weight. A small metric could sit directly on its section background, while denser information or a group of related actions still benefited from a container.

So I stopped giving everything its own white box. Related stuff could sit together, and the things that actually needed a container could keep one.

Limits made this obvious. On desktop, several small items could sit beside each other and save a lot of vertical space. Trying to carry that same arrangement onto a phone made each item cramped, with awkward wrapping that slowed down scanning.

I increasingly preferred a single reading flow on mobile and used the extra width on desktop. The item still needed to be recognizable, and its action had to behave the same way, but its position didn't need to prove that it was the same component.

Household started as a useful group, then kept absorbing things because so much of Cubby could plausibly go there. Eventually the label told me very little about what I'd find inside it.

Tasks and Limits were awkward in a different way because they could apply to almost any part of life. I tried groups based on the person, the domain and the purpose of the information, but none gave me a taxonomy that worked everywhere.

Eventually I stopped trying to find one taxonomy that worked everywhere. Home needed groups that were easy to scan, while navigation needed groups that helped me find stuff. The database could organize the same records differently again.

I initially put a pin control on individual Limits because it seemed convenient to choose one right there. But it became unclear what the pin meant, particularly when the same Limit appeared in different places. Was I changing something in Limits or choosing what appeared on Home?

What I wanted was to choose the Limits in my Home quick log, so I moved that into Customize on the Home section. That gave the setting a clear place to live and let the individual tiles go back to showing the allowance and the add button. I could also remove the old pin behavior from the shared component, which was one less thing to keep around.

I liked the floating dock when I built it, but I kept misclicking it in actual use. Eventually I went back to a conventional navigation bar with labels, which worked much better. It was a bit annoying to give up something I'd enjoyed building.

I ran into a similar problem when I made create buttons more compact. New task and Add flight became less obvious when I replaced the words with generic icons, so I restored the labels. Moving a page title beside the back button was a better way to save space because I could reclaim a row and still read everything.

A back arrow can stay compact because its meaning is familiar. I'd taken that too far with actions that actually needed words. Now if a label doesn't fit, I try fixing the layout before deleting the label.

Using one colour at different opacities seemed like a tidy way to build the palette. Once I had tinted sections and cards, though, that colour was blending against several different backgrounds.

I ended up with intermediate shades that looked washed out and slightly dirty. There was no single obviously wrong colour, but the whole page had lost some crispness. The variables were consistent while the colours I actually saw weren't.

So I started choosing the actual surface colour I wanted instead of insisting everything come from one neat opacity formula.

When I add to a Limit, the moving fill shows me that it registered. Haptic feedback helps too, especially when I'm logging something while doing something else and would otherwise have to check the screen again.

Some completions get a brief star effect, and a bigger moment can have confetti. I initially thought of these as polish, but using the same quick actions several times a day made an ambiguous response more annoying than I'd expected. Just felt nicer.

The filled squircle is a good example. Watching the water move connects the action to the allowance I have left, without another message to read. That made the animation useful even before I considered whether I liked how it looked.

But recording my kid's temperature would be a strange moment for confetti. The save had succeeded, but someone was still sick. The feedback system now has separate levels, with confetti reserved for milestones. An ordinary save can confirm that the record went through without a celebration.

I also wanted to stop short of points and streaks. There's already enough to keep up with at home, and I wanted the small interactions to feel good without giving us another score to maintain.

My wife sometimes says, “You can do it for me.” That's fair enough because we share a household and I can record it for her. But if she keeps finding it easier to tell me than to open Cubby, I have to take that seriously.

I'm a fairly forgiving user of my own app because I know where everything is and why I built it. I already think the information is worth recording. She might find the process troublesome, or she might just get less out of the record than I do.

I'm still figuring that part out. Making a button clearer might help with the first problem, but if keeping Cubby up to date mainly benefits me, it's understandable that she'd rather leave it to me.