Why did I build Strive?

Have you ever felt like you’re just going through the motions? Checking off tasks but not really moving toward anything meaningful? I felt this way after returning from my mission, where every day had clear purpose and direction.

Mission

While I was serving as a missionary for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, we used this app for planning called AreaBook, later rebranded to the Preach My Gospel or PMG app. We were taught a few fundamental principles: 

1. Planning. Spending even just a few moments each morning to plan your day is surprisingly helpful. Especially when preceded by a moment of prayer to bring the spirit.
2. Intentionality. Everything you do each day should work towards the ultimate goal of returning to our father in heaven and helping as many others as we can to do the same.
3. Return and report. At the end of the day, assess how well your plan went and make adjustments in the future.

These three core ideas are super important: Plan with the spirit; do things for a reason; report on what you did and adjust.

Existing Systems

Let’s look at some of the existing systems and maybe we’ll be able to piece together what’s missing and why Strive helps fill those gaps.

Calendar Apps

Google Calendar, Apple Calendar, Microsoft Outlook, you name it. These are all great for keep track of events, but they can’t tell you if your 2pm meeting actually matters for your long term goals. Nor do they help you keep track of all your todos - the little things that can be done whenever and don’t necessarily deserve an entire calendar event.

Task Managers

Think of Todoist, Reminders, any other of the thousands of task managers. They’re great for keeping track of the granular things you need to do, but those completed checkboxes don’t connect to any bigger vision for your life.

Productivity Tools

These are often built on proven systems, but frequently are either too complicated to use, or take too much time to maintain. You may start off using the system, but when life gets crazy, that time you spend in the productivity app is the first thing to go.

Strive - How it connects what you do and why you do it

The goal of Strive is to take the good parts of the existing systems and build something that’s simple, familiar, and achieves the three core principles mentioned earlier. Strive helps you to quickly plan each morning in a way that doesn’t take much time. When you create a goal and attach events and tasks to that goal, then even if you forget to plan the day, you’ll still have at least some of your day already planned out and you’ll have the reassurance that what you do have planned is working towards the vision you have for your life. Strive helps you to focus what you do on building towards your goals in a way that’s intuitive and manageable by connecting tasks and events directly to the goals you’re working towards. Strive helps you to return and report so that you can learn what works and what doesn’t. You can make an event reportable allowing you to say whether or not you did something. That’s something that simply doesn’t exist in any other system, but is surprisingly helpful.

TL;DR

Current calendar, todo, and productivity apps don’t fill the need of planning, intentionality, and return and report. My objective in building Strive Planner is to build a system that’s simple, and helps you work towards your goals in life, whatever they may be.