The story
I built this for my own gaps.
I have ADHD. Beatrice started as the thing I needed and could not find, and most of what is in it exists because I dropped something and it cost me.
What I kept losing
Never the important things.
I would remember the meeting. What went was the recycling that only goes out every other week. The friend whose dad was sick, who I absolutely meant to check on. The filter that wants changing twice a year and which I have honestly never once changed on time.
None of it is urgent on any particular day. All of it is the sort of thing that, missed enough times, quietly changes what people think of you. And none of it responds to trying harder, which is the advice I had been given for about twenty years.
What I tried
Everything I tried kept score.
The number going back to zero was reliably the last time I opened that app.
They all had a streak, and missing a single day sent it back to nothing.
Several of them showed me a summary of what I had failed to do that week, which is a strange thing to hand somebody who is already painfully aware.
The ones that avoided all that had the opposite problem. So little shape to them that I would set one up carefully on a good day and never think about it again.
The rules
So the rules came before the features.
Nothing in Beatrice keeps score. Points only go up. Nothing goes red. No screen anywhere lists what you missed.
It asks more than once, because I need it to, and it asks in exactly the same words every time so the fourth ask does not sound more disappointed than the first. That was the hardest thing to get right and it is the first thing I would defend. The reasoning is written up in why it works.
One problem
Two problems that turned out to be one.
I built the household half first and the friendship half second, and it took me longer than it should have to notice they are the same problem in different clothes.
Both are invisible. Both come around again. Neither is ever the most urgent thing today. Both cost you something with another person when they slip.
That is why one app does both, rather than two apps that would each be half an answer. Friends holds the people; Household holds the house.
Get Beatrice
Still being built.
It is in beta on iPhone and it is free. I am one person, building it in the evenings. If you have the same gaps, try it and tell me what broke.
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