Why I built Motive

Motive is a weekly planner built around life roles, by one programmer who needed it. I ran my life as a single to-do list until the list said everything was fine and my marriage said otherwise. Stephen Covey’s idea of roles explained what the list couldn’t; paper couldn’t hold it for more than a few weeks; the apps I tried were built around something else. So I built the one I needed.

One list

I worked, and I was a parent. That was the whole list. If you had asked me what my life consisted of, I’d have named those two things with some pride — that is what a responsible adult is supposed to sound like. Everything else was a rounding error.

My marriage was ending, and I was trying to save it. That is the only reason I finally read The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, a book I had ignored for years because of its title. Things at home had got bad enough that I was willing to read anything.

Covey, read as a data model

Two ideas in the book took me apart. The first was life roles: you are not one person with one list. You are a parent, a partner, a professional, a friend, a body that needs looking after — and those are separate. They don’t trade. A good quarter at work does not pay anyone at home for anything. I had been running my life as if effort poured into one tank would show up in the others.

The second was the emotional bank account: every relationship has a balance of deposits and withdrawals. I did the arithmetic on mine, and I hadn’t made a deposit in months.

I’m a programmer and allergic to this genre of book. But this wasn’t a pep talk. It was a model — and it described my life better than the one I was using.

What the roles showed me

I put my tasks under roles, and the roles started answering questions I hadn’t asked.

• A task with nowhere to go. One task fitted under no role at all. It had been eating a couple of hours a week for months because someone once asked me to do it. I stopped. Nobody noticed.
• Husband is not Household. The role named after my wife was the busiest one I had — groceries, the tap, the car — and none of it was about her. Running a house and being a partner are different jobs. I split them.
• Employee and Entrepreneur. I wanted to build my own thing, the savings ran out, and I took a job. Writing two roles where there had been one gave the job a boundary and the other thing somewhere to live.

These are the ideas behind the first step of the method: define your roles.

Paper, a few weeks at a time

I tried to keep it on paper — a page for the week, roles down the side, tasks underneath. Several times. Each attempt lasted a few weeks and then quietly stopped. The method kept making sense; the notebook kept losing.

The apps I tried

I went looking for the official app and found there isn’t one: the method lives on in paper planners and corporate training, not in an app. So I tried what people use instead — TickTick, Sunsama, Nirvana. They are good apps, and each is built around something else: the list, the day, the inbox. None of them started the week from the question Covey asks — what does each part of my life need this week?

So I built it

I started writing Motive in early 2026, and I plan my own weeks in it. It follows the loop the book describes, plus the parts paper never managed:

1. Roles — who you want to be in each part of your life.
2. Dreams and goals — written down before you know how, then committed to, with the obstacle named.
3. The week — small steps toward them, given real days.
4. The weekly review — what happened, by role, and what changes next week.
5. A clear head — everything else written down, out of the way.

It is one person’s project, in early access and free while it is. Inside the app there is a Talk to the founder button; it reaches me directly.