An experiment in intentionality, two years in
If you’ve read anything else on here you’ll know this is a bit of a recurring theme for me. Trying to take back my attention, pondering about screens ruling us. I keep circling the same problem: trying to be present and less distracted by things which don’t bring me value.
What I haven’t actually written about, oddly, is the thing that came out of all that circling. Two years ago I built a web app called Daily Intention. The gist of it is that Every morning you write one sentence — what you want today to be about — and a line on why it matters. Every evening you look back, honestly, and ask: how did I get on with that? No streaks, no scoring, no notification badge guilting you back in. Just the habit of asking the question, twice a day, until it starts asking itself.
I built it because all my other attempts at this were defensive — blocking Twitter, deleting email off my phone, etc. Useful, but they only answer half the question. Remove the distraction and do what instead? Daily Intention was my attempt at the other half.
I also, at the time, half-wondered if it might become something. Set up a limited company for it — The Sky is on Fire — filed it under the optimistic assumption that a business might follow. It didn’t. Here’s an entry from around a year ago, me trying to talk myself into (or out of) keeping the company going:
Should I keep TSIOF running or dissolve the company?
Say I managed to earn £100/month from TSIOF, that needs balanced against hosting costs, accountancy costs, mental overhead of having a business in the first place. That would give me £1200/year “trading” income which is beyond the £1000 of tax free trading income that HMRC gives you for free.
Considering it’s been 2 years and I’ve grossed exactly £0 I’ve got a long way to go before I’m bursting that limit.
Even if I kept the site running for myself and the handful of others who are using the site, that would only come to ~£100 hosting per year plus some domain costs. Keeping the company running requires annual accountancy software costs etc which eats into my non-existent revenue.
It looks an awful lot like I should dissolve the company.
Reader, I dissolved the company in December 2025.
But — and this is the important part — closing the company isn’t the same as closing the app.
Daily Intention is still running. Still free. I still use it daily. What I closed was the fiction that this was a business. The company was the part that had to justify itself — the filings, the accountancy software, admin that only makes sense if money’s actually moving, which it wasn’t. The app never needed any of that to be worth keeping around.
Honestly, I was close to shutting the whole thing down. I’m the only regular user — I could do the exact same practice in Day One and never think about hosting or maintenance again. What stopped me was a line I’ve been sitting with lately, from somewhere I won’t bother getting into: “what’s a useful thing you could build that you wish existed in the world?”. I don’t just use Daily Intention because I happened to build it. I still genuinely think it’d be useful to more people than just me, and that felt like a bad reason to let it quietly disappear.
That’s genuinely all Daily Intention ever was, company or no company. Not a business plan, just something I wished existed. Two years, £0 gross, and it turns out that’s fine, because grossing £0 was never really the point.
So: no Ltd company anymore, still a working app at dailyintention.co. If you’ve ever found yourself doom-scrolling and wondering how you got there instead of doing the thing you meant to do, it might be worth a look. And unlike most of my “I’ll update on this” posts, I actually mean it this time — I’ve got two years of this thing quietly working, so there should be something worth saying next time round.
