Building a Mirror

Wren is live in the Mac App Store. It's a time tracker for Mac that shows you the shape of your day—not just the hours, but the rhythm. Long blocks of focus or scattered fragments.

This is the first app I've shipped. I'm not a developer by training. I spent the last decade leading content teams. I built Wren using Claude Code, directing the development rather than writing Swift from memory. But this essay isn't really about the tool or the technology. It's about what building it taught me.

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?

What I needed wasn't a boss tracking my hours. I needed awareness—some objective record that I could look at and know: yes, I contributed. Now I can stop.

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, downtime, the ambient overhead of being in an office. When you track pure output—punch in, punch out—the intensity is different. 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.

Clockify told me the total. Six hours, say. What it didn't tell me was whether those hours came in two long, focused blocks or twelve scattered fragments. The number was the same; the experience wasn't.

Some days I'd finish energized. Others I'd finish depleted. The total couldn't explain the difference. The shape of the work was invisible.

I found myself wanting a different kind of metric—not just duration, but rhythm. Not just how long, but how. Were my sessions getting longer? Was I settling into flow, or skipping across the surface?

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 mean sustained focus. Gaps mean breaks. Lots of short segments mean fragmentation. You see it at a glance.

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. Not because I forced anything. Because I could see what stopping early would do to the bar. The visual made the cost of interruption tangible in a way that a number never did.

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 been heavily embedded in Clockify. Lots of historical data. 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 showed me something Clockify never had: the length of my sessions. The rhythm of my day, rendered visually. That insight—how long I was sustaining focus before breaking—turned out to be the thing I'd been missing for years.

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 became less focused on looking ahead and more focused on the forcing function of getting into flow and capturing what happened.

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.

This felt important for my first app. Not a dashboard full of analytics. A utility. Something you actually use, daily, because it helps you see.

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.

The difference between being tracked and choosing to see is the whole thing. External measurement creates pressure. Internal awareness creates clarity. Same data, different relationship.

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.

Ten years ago, building an app would have cost thousands of dollars—minimum. An MVP from a developer, if you could find one, if you could afford it. Now I can just do it. Strong taste, strong opinions, and the patience to iterate with Claude Code. That combination is new. And it's available to anyone willing to learn.

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.

Wren is available on the Mac App Store.