· 7 minute read
Building a Mirror
What shipping my first app taught me about time, awareness, and becoming a builder.
Wren is live in the Mac App Store. It's a time tracker for Mac that shows how long you spend on each session and where the breaks fall.
This is the first app I've shipped. I'm not a developer by training. I spent the last decade working in content. I built Wren using Claude Code, directing the development rather than writing Swift from memory.
The six-minute intervals
The first time I tracked my time, I was a junior accountant in my early twenties. We logged hours in six-minute intervals. The target was 70-80% billable. Everything was measured.
I hated it.
Not the accountability itself. I understood why it mattered. But the granularity felt suffocating. The surveillance. The pressure to justify every fraction of an hour. Time tracking became something that was done to me, not something I chose. By the time I left that job, I told myself I'd never do it again.
Rebellion, then drift
In 2019, I quit my day job to go full-time in a business I'd been running on the side. I rebelled against the conventional structures. Slept late, worked whenever I wanted. Total autonomy.
But something uncomfortable emerged. I'd get to the end of a day, or a week, and not know if I'd actually shown up for myself. The to-do list might be partially checked, but I couldn't say whether I'd put in the work required to succeed on my own. That uncertainty followed me into evenings. I struggled to relax. I couldn't Netflix and chill without a low hum of guilt.
Did I earn this rest? Did I actually work today, or just move between screens?
I needed a record of what I'd done so I could stop for the day without wondering whether I'd worked enough.
Choosing to see
So I started logging again. This time by choice. Just a note in Apple Notes at first: what I worked on, for how long. Then spreadsheets. Eventually Clockify, which I used for five years.
The practice changed my relationship with time. I discovered I could hit 25 or 30 hours in a week and be completely exhausted. That confused me. I thought I was used to 40-50 hour weeks from previous jobs. But those hours had included meetings, admin and downtime. I was now logging only the time I spent working on something, and those hours were more tiring. Thirty hours of focused creative work is not the same as fifty hours in a workplace.
I also discovered my rhythm. Mornings are when I do deep work. Afternoons are when I go to the gym and take time away from the screen. Evenings, after exercise, I get another block of focus. Once I could see this pattern, I could design around it. Creative tasks in the morning. Admin in the afternoon. The rhythm became something I worked with, not against.
Tracking gave me permission to rest. When I could see the hours logged, I could close the laptop without guilt.
What the tools didn't show
But something was still missing.
I mostly used Clockify to check my totals. Its calendar can show individual time blocks, but I was not using it to notice how my day was broken up.
Some days I'd finish energized. Others I'd finish depleted. The total couldn't explain the difference.
I wanted to know whether I was staying with a task for longer or stopping every few minutes.
Building the thing I wanted
Wren started as an attempt to answer that question. The core is a visual timeline. I call it the rhythm bar, which shows your day as it unfolds. Long blocks show longer recorded sessions. Gaps show untracked time. Lots of short segments show a more fragmented record. None of that measures attention directly. You see it at a glance.
- Total time
- 4h 38m
- Sessions
- 3
- Average session
- 1h 33m
I built it using Claude Code. I'm not writing Swift syntax from memory. I'm describing what I want, reviewing what Claude produces, and iterating until it's right. Years of giving clear feedback to collaborators turned out to be the same skill as directing AI development. Patience. Specificity. Knowing when something isn't quite right and being able to articulate why.
The breakthrough was realizing that average session length tells you something that total hours can't. An average session of 18 minutes means something different than an average session of 52 minutes, even if the daily total is identical. One pattern indicates scattered attention. The other indicates depth.
Once I started watching this number, my sessions got longer. Seeing the short blocks on the bar made me more aware of how often I stopped.
The reach test
There's a concept I first heard from the team at Every: the reach test. How often do you naturally reach for the tool? Not because you're supposed to, but because you want to.
I'd used Clockify for years and had a lot of data saved there. When I started building Wren, I ran both tools in parallel for a couple of weeks. My goal was to switch to Wren exclusively by January 2026.
I did. And I felt no pull to go back.
That surprised me. Clockify is powerful, but Wren made my session lengths easier for me to notice. Seeing the rhythm of my day helped me ask better questions about how I was working.
I also started adding reflections to any session over 30 minutes. Short notes about what I worked on, what I noticed. These feed into weekly insights, a kind of personal letter to myself every Monday. The reflections replaced some of my to-do list habits. I spent less time planning what to do next and more time working, then writing down what I'd done.
Mirror, not coach
Philosophically, I don't turn on notifications. I don't use Slack on my phone, only desktop. I like to be in control of when I engage with tools. I don't like them shouting at me.
Wren reflects this. It doesn't give advice. It doesn't score your productivity. It doesn't tell you to work harder or nudge you toward goals. It just shows you what happened.
I wanted the tool to disappear. When you're using Wren, you shouldn't be thinking about Wren. You should be thinking about your creative work. The app is a mirror, a reflection of how you're spending your time. Nothing more.
Coming full circle
There's something strange about this arc. I started by resenting time tracking: the six-minute intervals, the billable hour targets, the sense of being watched. Then I chose it for myself, as a way to find structure in autonomy. And now I've built a tool to help others do the same.
Tracking felt different when I chose to do it. I could use the record to decide when I'd done enough, instead of worrying about meeting someone else's target.
Wren passed my own reach test. I use it every day. My sessions are longer than they used to be. I know my rhythm better. I can relax at night because I've seen the record of effort. That's all I wanted, for myself, and now for anyone else who works this way.
Becoming a builder
Now I have an app in the Mac App Store. That's surreal. I'm still processing it.
Has my identity shifted? I think so. I'm still a writer. But I've started thinking like a designer, a product manager, an engineer. Skills I maybe always had, but never had a project to explore them.
I used to assume I would need to hire a developer before I could build an app. Now I could describe what I wanted, review each version, and keep going until I was happy with it.
Building Wren has been one of the most fun things I've done in years. There's something almost addictive about it. Every waking hour over the Christmas holiday, I wanted to build. Even my downtime became building time. It's a hobby that can also be a product. That feels rare.