Untangling Life through Software

Freestyling life as kids led to some of our most cherished memories. Tales of exploration and adventure, with a vague idea of where we were heading and what it takes to get there.

As we’ve grown up, we’ve all realized that life is different from what we’ve imagined. 😓 Especially in the last few years. Only the luckiest among us can say that they’ve never been sidetracked from their goals or felt overwhelmed.

Our lives are exponentially more complex than ever before. Besides the simple chores, our jobs, our responsibilities, we now face an information flood, agendas being pushed from all around, an ever-hardening economy, global conflicts. It’s hard to even keep track, let alone try to excel through them.

Add to that the actual critical priorities like taking care of one or multiple children, or an elderly person, and you’re set. And what about getting those healthy exercise sessions in? Things start to push the limits quickly.

Performance & Expenditure

Whether you’re an optimist or a pessimist, whether you care about the global state of the world or completely ignore it, the only thing that matters, besides your principles, is how well you perform in life, regardless of how you quantify that or what your beliefs, goals, and dreams are.

Considering that, there are only two factors that can influence your life, besides 🍀 random luck:

The way you invest your time and your performance in doing so.

Designing for the Human Life

It seems obvious that, besides cutting out the irrelevant things from our lives, the next best thing we can do for ourselves is to find ways to be more efficient in managing our day.

This thought has fascinated us ever since college, and we’ve slowly come to realize that there’s no single software built to help us thrive and succeed in managing our complex lives.

A software centered around the way we live, our goals in life, and what it takes to get there, from the mundane tasks like grocery shopping to more intensive ones like focused mental work or preparing for a marathon.

In the last year, we’ve made efforts to build a product that we consider checks as many boxes as possible for being classified as designed to help us live better. It starts with the one thing we all have in common: time, and the way we spend it.

The Clepside Vision

In our attempt to make Clepside as humane as possible, we’ve built a few abstractions that are universally understandable and relevant to how we spend our time as humans: cards, sessions, and activities.

Cards

To Create Powerful Contexts. In Clepside, cards are foundational; you can rely on them in every context. We view each card as a small piece of functionality that enriches the context you choose. Here are a few that will be available at launch:

Sessions

To Timebox Like Never Before. Now that we have a grip on the idea of using cards to add context, it’s time to go further and explore the powerful combination of adding cards to certain times of your day. This integration of sessions with cards is what truly allows Clepside to shine. Consider these scenarios:

Timeboxing has gained significant traction in recent years for a good reason: it works. Through Clepside we hope we’ll take it to a whole new level.

We’ve dedicated great care to the planning aspect of sessions and we’ve found UI patterns that will make scheduling faster than ever before, minimising the time it takes to plan things. If planning ever felt like a chore, it should not feel that way in Clepside, planning consists in most cases of a simple drag, and a single tap.

Moreover, sessions can be shared with others, effortlessly passing context and instantly transforming your card contexts into time-bound collaborative spaces.

Activities

To Tie Everything Together. Whether it’s work, GYM sessions, morning routines, evening routines, picking the kids up from school, commuting, there are things we do every day. In Clepside, each session you create belongs to an activity.

This organization simplifies tracking your habits and accomplishments. Wondering when you last hit the gym or how many hours you’ve worked in the past week? Curious about your sleep patterns recently?

Clepside offers insights into these questions, providing snapshots of how you’re spending your time and what trends may be emerging, helping you plan your next steps effectively.

Besides the metric aspect, activities can also hold cards, show you a log of your past and future sessions, and even be shared with others.

To take auto-scheduling of activities to the next level, we’ve also designed a routines functionality, which allows you to be as flexible as you want. We provide you with the ability to set wiggle rooms and priorities, and let auto-scheduler do the rest.

Final Thoughts

After navigating through the current crisis of social media clutter and overload of information, we believe society is nearing a point where a shift back to what truly matters — our lives and our aspirations — is essential.

Societal trends swing back and forth like a pendulum, and Clepside is our attempt at kick-starting the trend upwards, ditching all the clutter and focusing on the hard things that truly matter, a way of unknotting our lives, planning things out, and following through without missing a beat.

We’ve designed Clepside to be able to fill the shoes of your to-do app, notebook, calendar app, shared grocery list, while enabling fast context-switching and detailed planning.

Some more technical attributes:

• iOS Native
• Cross-Platform (iOS + Web at launch)
• Offline-first
• Real-time collaborative, to the core
• Designed for short interactions
• Intuitive

Designing software to help all of us live better is no easy feat, but with your help, we hope we can do a good job, so please consider joining us with your thoughts, expectations, and potential bug reports in our Reddit community at r/clepside. Alternatively, follow us on social media to stay updated on our progress.

Clepside will be an invite-only BETA period until we’ll get the wheels properly spinning. You can sign up below to join our invite list. We’ll grant access on a rolling basis, based on the time of enrollment.