Building Life Manager in the open
Why I'm building one app for my routine, health, meals, screen time and money, and testing it on myself for three months.
Today is day one of a three-month self-test. From October to December 2026 I’m running my days on Life Manager, an app I’m building for one person first: me.
What it does
- Today: my routine as a checklist that ticks itself off. The wake-up is read from my sleep, the morning walk from my steps, breakfast from the meal I log.
- Health and training: weight against a goal, steps and sleep, and a guided bodyweight circuit with voice cues.
- Meals: I type what I ate, matooke with beans and a small piece of beef, and get calories and macros back, editable item by item.
- Focus: daily limits on the apps that eat my evenings, with a lock at bedtime.
- Money: wallets in UGX and dollars, and treasury bonds and unit trusts with what they should pay next to what they did.
How it’s built
A .NET API on PostgreSQL, a Kotlin app for Android and a SwiftUI app for iOS. The phones work offline and sync when they can. Money is always decimal, never double, and balances are never stored, only derived. That rule came from an accounting system where a double once turned 10,000,000.00 into 9,999,999.99.
Why write about it
I’ll use this space to think out loud: what worked, what I got wrong, and what a month of honest data says about my habits. If you want to try the test build on Android, it’s on the Life Manager page.