I built Alora
for myself.

For anyone who has tried every planner, and ended up behind on the planner too.

A project of necessity

forgetting things meant
covering for them.

I would never call Alora a passion project. It was a project of necessity.

For most of my life, forgetting things meant covering for them. The small task I didn't write down, because writing it down took longer than just doing it. Then a few more. Then the big thing, buried under all the small ones, that surfaced two weeks later already overdue. I burned more energy hiding what I'd dropped than the thing would have taken me to just do.

Same ending every time

I tried everything
to fix it.

So I tried everything to fix it. The apps. The spreadsheets. The paper planners. The notebooks. The project management tools. The complicated ones with two dozen setup steps I'd follow for a week, then forget. I'd spend hours, sometimes days, setting each one up to fit how my head works. For a day or two it almost did. Then the admin weight got heavy, the little tasks stopped going in, and the whole thing fell apart. Same ending every time. Not because I didn't want it. Because it was never built for the way I work.

I finally couldn't take it anymore, and built my own.

No research. No company plan. I just needed something that worked.

The opposite way

I was building
a life planner.

I started where my day started: the thing in front of me, the next task, the pile of stuff rattling around in my head. I built up from there. And somewhere in the middle of it I realized I wasn't building a daily planner. I was building a life planner, and it ran the opposite way from how I'd built it. It doesn't start with today. It starts with a vision of the life you want, comes down through the blueprint for how to build it, and only then gets to the one small thing to do today that moves you toward it.

  • a vision of the life you want
  • the blueprint for how to build it
  • the one small thing to do today that moves you toward it
Alora Vision Board on iOS
Alora Blueprints on iOS
And it worked

the first thing I noticed
was that I was calmer.

And it worked. Not for two days or a couple of weeks, like everything before it. The first thing I noticed was that I was calmer. My head wasn't as noisy, and that allowed me to find the clarity and continual motivation I needed. The stuff I always lost finally had a home, so I could always find it...no more disappearing and forgotten tasks. I could look at today without losing the bigger thing, and look at the bigger thing without losing today.

Alora Today view on iOS
It wasn't supposed to be a product

then people
asked for it.

I was proud of it. That's the honest reason I showed it to anyone, my wife first, then friends, then people who caught sight of what I was working on. They kept asking the one thing I didn't see coming: where can I get it? I built it for myself. That was the whole point. They're the reason I started wondering if it was for anyone else.

Turns out it might not be
just for me.

If any of this is your life too, Alora is ready when you are.

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