I had to get busy again to find out whether my to-do app worked

I was doing everything I could to stay on top of work. Then I would walk into a meeting with management or a stakeholder and think: how the fuck did I miss this?

I was managing a team, working with different departments, handling marketing channels and coordinating with agencies. There were commitments everywhere.

At night, I would think about what I might have forgotten. In the morning, I would wake up trying to reconstruct what needed my attention.

That was the problem I wanted Qubit to solve: a to-do list that could fill itself in from my work, so remembering to write something down wasn’t always another task.

Then I quit my job and accidentally removed the conditions that made me need it.

I disappeared into building

I left my job in June 2026. For roughly three to four months, I buried myself in Qubit.

Build. Fix something. Build again.

I turned down freelance and consulting projects. I also run LAN, a community of marketers in Bangalore, and I was saying no to organizing more events.

I thought I was protecting my focus.

But my days had become unusually simple. Almost everything pointed toward one thing: building Qubit. I had fewer conversations, fewer competing responsibilities and fewer commitments to other people.

I was building a product for a working life I was no longer living.

My own conviction was missing

My product philosophy is that something should be useful before I ask people to spend their time on it, even as an MVP.

Customers will find problems I cannot anticipate. Their feedback matters. But I wanted to believe, from using Qubit myself, that it could do something worth their attention.

Working on the product all day wasn’t giving me that conviction. I needed to see what happened when commitments arrived from several directions and building Qubit was only one of them.

So I started taking on consulting work again. I resumed organizing community events. I spent more time on customer interviews and began building Qubit’s marketing channels.

My work became complicated again.

Then everything arrived in the same week

At one point, I had two consulting projects underway and a prospective third. Two LAN events were coming up. I had roughly 10 to 15 meetings, possibly more, alongside community operations, website fixes and Qubit’s development.

Now there were consequences to getting absorbed in the product.

My default morning was still to open Qubit’s development work and start building. Meanwhile, I owed things to consulting clients, including a report on the previous month’s data.

Seeing that commitment on my to-do board gave me a reason to stop and handle it before disappearing into another feature.

I could finish the client work, clear it from my active list and return to building with less unfinished business occupying my attention.

That was much closer to the situation I had originally built Qubit for.

Capturing tasks exposed the next problem

As Qubit captured more work, my list grew.

Eventually, I had enough tasks that maintaining the list was becoming work of its own. I still needed to update items after conversations, remove completed work and distinguish what mattered now from what could wait.

I recognized an old pattern. Before Qubit, I would create a to-do list every couple of months, struggle to maintain it and eventually abandon or delete it.

Automatically creating a longer list would not solve that.

This period pushed me to work on the other half of the problem: keeping the list current.

Recognizing completed work mattered. So did having somewhere to put tasks I intended to revisit someday, without treating them as immediate obligations. Planning work for a future month helped me separate it from what needed attention now.

Tell Qubit came from being tired of updating Qubit

One frustration was particularly obvious: tasks had been created automatically, but I was still manually changing them after my day moved on.

That helped shape Tell Qubit.

I wanted to press a key and talk through my day: what I had finished, what had changed and what I had agreed to do next.

In one session, I rambled through an update. Qubit added two tasks, updated four and closed seven that I had completed.

It also made a mistake. One item should have updated an existing task; instead, it created a new one. I corrected it and addressed that behavior in the next Qubit update.

That was a useful test because it showed both the value and the remaining work. I could see the list change from my spoken update, and I could identify a specific failure to fix.

Those counts describe that session, not a benchmark or a promise of accuracy.

How Qubit changed the way I worked

I started separating routine execution from work that needed more creative attention.

For a few hours, I could look at the board and work through the straightforward things I owed people. Then I could give a separate block of time to building, writing or thinking through a harder problem.

I still had to decide what mattered. I still had to check the list and correct mistakes. Qubit didn’t make every commitment reasonable or give me more hours.

But having the work in front of me helped me move between responsibilities without reconstructing everything from memory each morning.

The workload became part of the product development

Taking on more work brought its own overwhelm. I wouldn’t turn that into advice that every founder should overload themselves to test a product.

What I had been missing was regular contact with the problem.

Consulting, community events and conversations put Qubit back into the conditions that had made me want it in the first place. They exposed the cost of maintaining a growing list and gave me concrete reasons to improve completion recognition, planning and spoken updates.

I made Qubit because I was afraid of forgetting work.

Using it in a complicated working life changed what I understood the product needed to do. It also changed how I approached my own day: checking the commitments I already had before getting absorbed in creating something new.