Daymark: A Calm Planner for Flexible Planners

A local-first daily planner where folders hold the work, any step can be pulled into today, and each day leaves a hand-drawn mark of what got done.

🗓 Personal project · in daily use on my iPhone and Mac since September 2026

🧠 Problem

Most planners are built for one of two people.

• Strict planners get time-blocked calendars and rigid schedules.
• Spontaneous people get a plain to-do list that turns into an endless backlog.

I'm neither. I like having a plan, but I rearrange it all day. My tasks lived in three places: a to-do app for today, notes for ongoing projects, and a calendar for fixed events. None of them showed whether a day had actually gone well.

Two things kept going wrong:

• Projects with several steps didn't fit into a daily list, so they stayed in notes and got forgotten.
• Every to-do app I tried counted what I hadn't done: red badges, overdue counts, broken streaks. On a busy week, opening the app felt like being graded.

💡 Insight

The planner I wanted had to do three things:

1. Hold work somewhere that isn't today. Folders for multi-day work, whether or not it has a deadline.
2. Make moving things free. Pull a step into today, push it to tomorrow, or send it back to its folder without anything breaking.
3. Remember what got done, not what was missed. A visible record of each day that grows as you check things off.

Plan loosely, move freely, and keep a calm record of what you actually did.

🚀 Solution

Daymark joins a daily task list, folders, a read-only calendar and a completion history in one calm app.

• Today: tasks grouped by color-coded lists, with today's calendar events alongside.
• Folders: multi-day work with optional deadlines. Any step can be pulled into today, and it stays the same task, not a copy.
• Day Mark: a mark that fills in list colors as tasks are completed. Each user draws their own shape.
• Reflect: a week and month view that only adds up what got done.

✨ Key Features

✍️ Draw-your-own Day Mark

• New users draw a mark on the first screen: a circle, a heart, initials, anything, in as many strokes as they like.
• As tasks get done, the drawing fills stroke by stroke, in the order it was drawn, segmented by list color.
• Work finished on a later day shows as a lighter band, so a day's record stays honest without being negative.
• The same mark appears small in the calendar, so a month of marks shows how the month went at a glance.

📁 Folders that feed Today

• Folders hold work that spans days. Deadlines are optional, with countdowns when set.
• Tapping a folder pulls its next step into today. Dragging a task onto a folder sends it back.
• Pinned folders, manual ordering, archive and restore.

🔁 Moving work without losing the record

• Move a task to tomorrow, to a chosen date, back to its folder, or off the day entirely.
• Moving a task off a past day leaves a quiet "moved to Oct 7" trace, so earlier days keep their history.
• Routines appear as faint "ghost" rows until added: every day, on chosen weekdays, or N times a week.

📊 Reflect: only what you did

• The week's marks, a month grid, "17 done · across 7 days", effort per list, folders finished, and the fullest day.
• No percentages, no "missed", no comparisons with last week, no streaks. Days with nothing done stay blank.

🗓 Calendar view and import

• Google, iCloud and Outlook calendars connect through private iCal links.
• Events are read-only and never become tasks automatically. "Add to today" turns one into a task on purpose.

⌨️ Small things that make it daily-usable

• Quick add with N: "Send thesis outline tomorrow #study @thesis" is filed as a step in that folder, on tomorrow, in that list.
• Full English and Korean UI, with Korean copy written rather than machine-translated. Light and dark themes.
• Installable PWA on iPhone, Mac and Windows; works offline; backup export and import plus CSV export.

🏗 Architecture

Expo + React Native Web (TypeScript strict) ↓ Zustand store, persisted locally (AsyncStorage / localStorage) ↓ Sync engine: dirty queue · server-cursor pull · newest edit wins · tombstones ↓ Supabase Postgres (one daymark_items table, row-level security) ↓ Supabase Edge Function (Deno + ical.js) → read-only iCal feeds ↓ GitHub Actions → GitHub Pages (PWA with service worker)

• Local-first: the app works fully signed out and offline. An account only adds sync across devices.
• One selector for the Day Mark: completion is computed only from completedAt, in a single selector. Every surface (Today, calendar, Reflect) draws from the same numbers.
• Document-style sync table: every item is one JSON row keyed by (user, kind, id). The schema changed many times while I used the app daily; new fields never needed a server migration, and older clients never broke.

🧠 Key Decisions & Tradeoffs

• Removed time-blocking after building it. A drag-to-reserve-time rail on Today worked, but it made the app feel like a scheduler. I parked it, and Calendar became view + import only.
• "Projects with deadlines" became "Folders". Real work often has no deadline. Making deadlines optional and renaming the concept fit how I actually planned.
• Never show what was missed. Overdue counts and streaks were kept out on purpose. Moving a task off a day leaves a quiet trace instead of a red badge.
• Drag-and-drop only where it earns its place: reordering and moving tasks within Today, dropping a task on a folder, and reordering folders. Nowhere else.
• Local-first over server-first. This added a sync engine to build, but it means the app opens instantly, works offline, and never requires an account.
• Kept it a web app. I planned an App Store launch (accounts, notifications, widgets), then chose to keep using the installable web app and park the native work.

🎨 Design Process

• App icon: 13 rounds of generated studies, from abstract rings (top) to a lowercase "d" built from the Day Mark itself, ending with a peach → rose → lavender → sky gradient (bottom right).
• Day Mark: went through five treatments (watercolor wash, ribbon, glass tube, doodle, and a classic ring) before doodle became the default and the drawn mark shipped as Custom.
• Layout: spacious task screens and dense calendar screens; a two-column desktop layout and a compact phone layout with a Tasks | Schedule pager.

⚙️ How I Built It

I built Daymark solo, working with AI coding agents in Claude Code. I planned and reviewed with Claude Opus, and delegated implementation to Claude Sonnet with written specs.

My role:

• Product direction, every product and design decision, and daily dogfooding
• Writing specs and reviewing every change: type checks, web builds, and screenshots at phone and desktop sizes before each deploy
• Keeping the docs as the source of truth: a PRD, design guide, architecture notes, and a decision log of 70+ entries

The result was 75 small, verified commits in about six weeks, with each working state auto-deployed to GitHub Pages.

🔗 Links

• App: https://masibasi.github.io/daymark/
• GitHub: https://github.com/masibasi/daymark

🧭 Reflection

Building something I use every day changed how I judged features. The questions stopped being "is this impressive?" and became "did this make today easier?" and "does opening the app feel good?"

Some of the best decisions were removals: time-blocking, mandatory deadlines, overdue counters. Daymark got calmer each time something left.