What I wanted is an app whose sole focus is to help me get where I want to be, while having access to that AI knowledge. I also need to be able to manually interact with the plan. It’s my plan after all. One way to describe what I want is a ChatGPT focused on my goals and tasks. ChatGPT or Claude do integrate with project management apps, but really, the friction of integration is significant.

AI chats have been incredible to help me tackle difficult goals. They just need that bit of structure to help with keeping the focus to actually reach these goals. In Task Matter, I settled on a structure of Goals that contain Tasks that contain Action Items. To organise my week and days, I, or AI, bring the most relevant tasks into a focus area. But AI is there at every scope: global focus, each goal, each task, each action item. One AI feed for each scope. And that feed is accessible whenever you click on the object. The feed is a lot more than an AI chat, but that deserves its own post. I am very very pleased with the feed. Lots of eureka moments to get there and make it just work.

That went a bit further into the “how” than I first meant. I can’t wait to write more about it. Coming back to what this is all for, Task Matter’s ultimate objective is to help users tackle any goal, using best available knowledge for each one. As a realistic first milestone, Task Matter is focusing on mid- to long-term personal goals. For me, it has been building Task Matter itself, company creation, GTM, personal admin, DIY, running, traveling and gardening. It is all over the place, but it is simply what is filling my life at the moment.

While creating a draft for the landing page, I’ve realised I needed to spell out the answer to “why” and “what for”, which I’ve answered above, with some “how” leaking in. I have no idea yet how I will summarise the above in a couple of sentences. Though I have some cheesy product taglines ideas already. Let me know what you think:

• My favourite one, “AI with purpose, your purpose”
• One stolen from the tennis coach Patrick Mouratoglou, “Don’t think you can’t, wonder how you will”
• Variation on that theme, “Assume you will, discover how.”

If you have ideas to suggest in the comments, be warned I won’t pay you if I choose them! Though I might give you attribution :)

My story is both banal and existential. Like many in the big tech sector, I burned out. I didn’t understand at first what was happening to me. I was not over-worked, enjoyed the technical challenges, and had great colleagues. I understood later that my burnout was a little more complex. It was due to a disconnect between work I thought mattered, and reality.

My employer at the time was LinkedIn, though the employer itself is irrelevant, the context did matter. I was a software engineer in a big tech company, working in a satellite engineering office here in Dublin, while most of engineering was located in the SF Bay Area. Following a reorg and team change, my colleagues, projects and org dynamic had all changed. I found myself working on a core service used widely across all systems. The online service ran reasonably well. My focus was on an area that desperately needed investment, the data ingestion flow. The thing about data ingestion is that it’s never a blocker. Even if the data is stale, systems continue to run. Restarting sustained investment and getting buy-in on a data ingestion project is not easy. It needs proper lobbying, ROI discussions, and technically challenging design work. The technically challenging work did appeal to me, but not the lobbying and ROI discussions. When meeting SF-based colleagues from Dublin, these discussions compete with personal time. Up to that point in my career, I had always prioritised personal time. Was prioritising lobbying discussions for this project going to be worth it? My gut and bones were telling me no, it was not. When I realised that the project I was working on didn’t matter to my hierarchy, and that I wasn’t ready to fight for it, I felt a profound emptiness. This piled onto the long list of exciting projects that got cancelled over the years. I do good work, engineers around me do great work, but it doesn’t matter, metrics end up not justifying the investment. I felt like whatever I was doing didn’t matter. This is true in the Grand Scheme of Things, but it is very wrong in the Grand Scheme of Me. My manager and doctor told me this was a burnout.

During my recovery, I found myself craving to achieve things that mattered to me again. I spent more time with my boys, travelled, did sport, studied, meditated. And I also thought about software. Software can be an incredible tool to help us achieve our goals. We tend to want to see AI as something that does things for us. But it is also incredibly helpful at guiding us to do the things we want to do, ourselves. That manager/coach/project management side of AI is being explored, but far from having been solved. What managers, coaches, project managers do today gives an idea of the sort of service that would benefit us. But as always with AI, it can both do a lot more than humans, and be completely unable to fill other aspects of the role. And AI is far from perfect. It can be misleading. It can do a lot of harm by mistake, or through malicious use. Where there are unsolved benefits and challenges, there is a business opportunity. And the AI benefits happened to be exactly what I needed to help me create the business itself. Exploring that direction sounded like a lot of fun.

After my leave, I eventually did return to LinkedIn as an employee. Time difference aside, working for a large US internet company is undeniably a huge privilege on many aspects of what a good job looks like. I did feel better, even enjoying working on a new project. But that time away had broken a mental barrier, creating a world of possibles outside big tech. Maybe small tech was also an option. All I could think of was the need to be free to make, and own. The fact AI was becoming more and more capable only increased the pull of simply going for it. So I ultimately did pull the plug, and plugged it somewhere that gave me a lot more energy.

The project name is “Task Matter”, which I am 95% decided upon. Another post will go over what made me choose that name. Technically it is an offline-first webapp with desktop and mobile modes. Functionally, it is AI chats with the purpose of helping us reach our goals.

The core model is made of goals that contain tasks that contain action items, and each level has its own AI session, which are called “feeds” in the app. There’s also a main AI feed “Focus” to set up goals and planning. This basic multi-AI feed framework opens up a whole world of opportunities for context management, prioritising tasks, and going deep on any given item. In other words, this architecture solves the problem of disposable AI sessions and memory management by tying them to a purpose.

Desktop is more polished at this stage, so the preview screencasts are desktop-only. These are AI-driven screencasts. I’ve tried hard to not let myself polish them to perfection. Again, early stage!

Creating goals with AI, either from a loose description …

… or pictures

Now prioritising tasks in the “Focus” screen:

Users can get guidance on a specific action item:

Achievements show where I stand on some of my goals (bit of a personal disclosure here! In particular, you can see I’m very late on the number of posts before end of May 😅):

The above shows the main capabilities as of today. It is the first set of features I want to release through invites. But there is a lot more I am working on.

AI starts to shine when it is prompted to go deep on a subject. The concept of AI skill exists because of that behaviour. In traditional AI apps, AI has to guess what skills it is going to need based on previous prompting. No context, no skills. As every goal, task, action item, and the global focus area each have their AI session, AI knows what we are focusing on from the first system prompt. This means the context, skills, or third-party integration relevant to the scope are automatically loaded. In other words, you click on a goal/task/action item, and you get the right coach or consultant for the job. Tailoring the AI interaction, and UI, to the type of task at hand is what really gets me excited about this project. Possibilities are infinite, and where there are infinite possibilities there’s an opportunity to open up to plugins and third-party developers.

That’s all for today. For the next post, we’ll rewind a bit and cover the Task Matter origin story, where the whole “I matter” therapeutic side of the meaning might make more sense (see the About page for the meanings of “I matter”).

Software is going through an AI revolution. Being a software engineer today is being an 18th century farmer transported overnight to the 21st century. We’re producing huge quantities in no time, and it looks great. And the wheat then harvests itself and turns into bread while we sleep. The bread does taste a little bland, but can we afford to care at this stage? The AI revolution is both transforming how we make software, and the software itself. An overnight double revolution.

And I am also facing my own internal revolution. I am mid-life and mid-career, and I cannot ignore my internal voices anymore. For half my life, these voices have been telling me to start trusting myself. And I have another half-life to go. A half-life is both too long to stay where I am, and enough time to build a career on my own terms. In short, now is the time.

This triple revolution is happening to many others who are also making the jump. And it’s great not to be alone on the journey. It also means the problem I want to solve is already being solved by many. But like in any ecosystem, there are infinite ways to solve similar problems, and thrive. And we have a whole new ecosystem to fill. I just hope my attempt will be unique enough to avoid that bland taste.