The last week of April I lost my grandmother, the beloved Babs. This woman showed me what unconditional love looks like. I'll miss her forever. Rest in heaven, Babs. I love you.

After taking the week off to say goodbye and mourn her, I noticed I'm on a path to burning myself out from working without enough recovery. Working hard 6 or 7 days a week isn't sustainable.

It wasn't until I took a week long break that I realized I was always mentally on and it was muddying my thinking and decision making. To try to protect against it, I built required rest into my executive system, which I'll get into below.

This quarter, I made a commitment to ship 4 more apps to the App Store and place distribution/marketing on hold. In other words, April was entirely for building. May and June will be the same.

I chose to do this because I felt like in my eagerness to stack skills (build, ship, launch, market), I was doing four things half heartedly. I chose to spend time focused on building because in the words of Ron Swanson, "never half-ass two things, whole-ass one thing." I'm trying to be patient with the big picture.

My intention with the remaining apps is to build things that I am already doing, but not in app form. Carla and I keep a shared movies to watch list. I'm turning it into an app. Carla and I play a ton of Yahtzee. I'm turning the scorecard into an app. I also have a specific workflow with AI to generate workouts for myself. I'm turning that into an app as well.

Contrast that to the Spanish app, where I was trying to develop a new habit for myself. Going forward I'm simply turning existing habits into apps. Why? Because I want to guarantee I use my own apps. It makes them much better.

Here's what I've got.

FIRE Projection

The first week of April, I shipped a tiny app called FIRE Projection. It helps you project when you will be financially free.

For the uninitiated, financially free means the interest on your invested assets grows at a rate that covers your spending. FIRE = financial independence, retire early. The math can be found in one of my favorite articles of all time by Mr. Money Mustache. Read it here.

The short version is if you know how much money you save and spend each month and the value of your current investments, you can calculate what date you'll reach this milestone. I built the app to ease some of my own anxiety about my financial future. The kids will be alright.

You can find FIRE Projection on the App Store or at fireprojection.io.

It's only a tiny calculator. Later I'll be building out a premium paid version with wider feature functionality. Funny enough, Monarch, my personal finance app of choice, rolled this feature out in the last four weeks for their premium members. Alas, I do not need to compete with Monarch. I just need to skim a few users off the top. If anyone at Monarch is reading this, hire me. Your app rocks and I have endless ideas to improve it.

AI Workout Generator

The next two weeks, I worked on an AI workout generator. It was exciting because it was my first foray into building an AI app that's not merely a chatbot. And boy oh boy was it a slog. I have the thing working, sort of, but it sucks. It doesn't recreate the experience that I easily create when firing up Claude or ChatGPT. I elected to pause it to take some space rather than struggle through in hopes I can identify a path forward when I'm more clear minded. I'll return to this after I ship the two apps below.

Yahtzee Scorecard and The Movie List

In the meantime, I played with Claude Design for the first time to design my next two apps, the Yahtzee Scorecard and The Movie List. Claude Design is a gamechanger. I love it.

My best ideas flow out of me and become an app really quickly. Yahtzee and the movie app took under two days each to get a working prototype because the idea was so clear in my mind.

I'll have more on those next month, as I expect to ship both in May. We'll see though, because last month I said I'd have 2 or 3 more apps shipped and I shipped exactly zero.

The Executive System

The executive system is an AI system I built early in 2026 to strategize and execute a path to sovereignty. I run my one person business like a portfolio company, and the system fills out the rest of the org chart.

AI tools tend to be overly agreeable and indiscriminately supportive. That's not helpful when I need an adversary to critique my ideas. I made sure this system pushes back properly.

It knows my values, my personality, and my failure modes. It uses that context to call me out when I'm rationalizing or drifting off plan. Once a month it convenes a synthetic board comprised of eight people across business, philosophy, and life who I deeply admire. They argue about my quarter and I participate in the discourse. By the end of the discussion, I've adjusted my orientation for the month ahead.

Day to day, here's what it does:

• sets quarterly strategic goals
• logs my daily work
• reviews my weekly work
• captures and triages new ideas, implementing them only when they align with current goals
• enforces the rest cadence I mentioned at the top of this post

A few peers wanted a version for themselves, so I turned it into an open source repository so anyone can give it a try. Find it here. I use it daily to stay on the tracks. I'll update this open sourced version periodically as I update my own version.

By the Numbers

The numbers this month are minuscule.

• 1,000 Spanish Words: 2 downloads, $2.80
• FIRE Projection: 16 downloads (free)

I didn't make any effort to promote my apps and the figures show. This is ok.

Thanks for following along folks.