Six Years Wasted to Scrolling. Now I Build What Saves Me
I am a software engineer who deep works from nine to six, comes home empty, and scrolls until midnight. I did that for six years. Four in college, three working professionally. Facebook reels, YouTube shorts, novels I could not put down even with an exam the next day, Dota 2 sessions I would uninstall out of guilt and reinstall months later.
I tried app blockers. I tried restricting my access. None of it worked.
When I look back at those six years, there is nothing to remember. No project finished. No skill built. No milestone outside of work. I lived, I scrolled, I slept.
So now I am building the thing that would have stopped me.
The Insight That Changed Everything
All of the scrolling, the novels, the games, they were symptoms. The root was simpler and uglier: I had no purpose.
When you have no goal, you fill the void with whatever is most interesting in the next five seconds. That is not a discipline problem. That is an architecture problem. Your life has no structure to hold anything up, so everything collapses into entertainment.
Once I found a purpose, the symptoms disappeared on their own. Same person, same brain, same job. Before: come home at 5:30, collapse, scroll until sleep. After: come home at 5:30, cook dinner, sit at the desk at 7 PM, build until midnight. Four to five hours of deep work after a full workday. No app blocker needed. No willpower hack. The distractions just stopped being interesting.
I am not selling a theory. I lived both sides.
What I'm Building
Inner Anchor is a task list app with a purpose line and a focus mode. That is basically it.
You write one purpose line for the day. You list a few tasks. You press Focus. A small always-on-top pill appears showing the current task and a progress bar. When you drift (and you will), you glance at the pill, tap back in, and you are working again. Two seconds, zero willpower.
No tags. No projects. No collaboration. No gamification. No sub-tasks, no dependencies, no dashboards, no AI planning. I refuse to build any of it. Not because I cannot, but because complexity is where most people stop. You spend thirty minutes organizing your tasks and feel productive, but you have not done any actual work.
The app also never punishes you. No streaks, no guilt notifications. Leave for a month. When you come back, it is clean. I deleted Duolingo because a broken streak felt worse than just quitting. I refuse to build that into anything I ship.
The Build
I am building this solo, alongside a full-time engineering job. React, TypeScript, Vite on the frontend. Node.js, Fastify, PostgreSQL, Prisma on the backend. Astro for the marketing site. All of it on a single GCP free-tier VM with 1 GB of RAM and 2 CPUs. No Docker. Bare metal with zram tuning. Nginx, Redis, systemd, UFW. GitHub Actions CI/CD over SSH.
The stack is intentionally simple. At zero revenue, every dollar matters and every dependency is a liability. I run PostgreSQL on the same box as the app server. I tuned shared_buffers and max_connections down until the whole thing fits comfortably in memory. People will tell you this does not scale. They are right. It does not need to. Not yet.
I work about 44 hours a week on this, carved from evenings and weekends. The same evenings that used to disappear into scrolling now go into shipping. The irony is not lost on me. The purpose I am building an app to help people find is the same purpose that lets me build the app at all.
The Philosophy in One Paragraph
You don't lack discipline. You lose the thread. Inner Anchor exists to keep the thread visible. Purpose at the top, a short list in the middle, a Focus button at the bottom. When calm conflicts with flexibility, calm always wins. The app is paid because when the product is free, you are the product. I want you to open the app, do the work, and close it. The faster you leave, the better the app did its job.
Where It Stands
Pre-revenue. Beta launching now. Free tier, $6/month Plus, $5/month annual, $199 lifetime with 200 seats. No credit card for the free trial. Founding Member badge for the first 200 paid subscribers.
I have no audience, no funding, no team. Just a philosophy I believe in, a product that embodies it, and the same four to five hours every night.
If you have ever stared at a task list and felt nothing but dread, or opened a productivity app after a week off and immediately closed it again, or ended a busy day unable to name one meaningful thing you did, this is what I am building for.