Baselife First Drafts and Soft Launch
Most products don’t start with strategy decks. They start with a notebook.
I recently found an old one at home with the first sketches of Baselife. I drew them in about thirty minutes on the subway, a couple of years ago.
Working around other people consistently unlocks my creativity. I slip into flow almost instantly. Maybe it’s some psychological magic, something adjacent to the observer effect: being seen makes the thinking sharper.
The tool matters too. For routine work like therapy notes or reading, I switched to reMarkable. But I still design interfaces on paper. There’s a different kind of clarity in the connection between physical and digital. The body understands shapes and constraints before the system does.
Scanning that notebook felt like the peak of this process. Translating physical things into digital form gives them a kind of permanence. Objects get lost. Digital traces tend to stay.
Baselife grew out of that transition. For years, it lived comfortably in my head: a nice name, occasional sketches, no real resistance. The real work started the moment I tried to register a domain, and discovered that all the good names were already gone. From there, I slowed down, isolated myself, and methodically turned vague sketches into something real.
Today, Baselife exists as a simple starting point. You can explore a life visualization and get a feel for the interface decisions. My favorite details so far are the logo animation and the current date in the favicon. That small touch gently brings me back to the present moment.
We’re building Baselife as a practice of noticing your life and thinking more clearly. Not through motivation, but accumulation. Clarity compounds when you pay attention over time.
That’s why everything starts with a life calendar. From there, more tools for life design will follow. Not to optimize life, but to see it.