Thirty days ago, we did something backwards.
Before we built a single public tool, we built the tracker that would keep us honest.
The logic was simple.
Two ADHD founders.
Two countries.
A long and documented history of starting things, getting excited, and wandering off mid-sentence to go and…
Sorry.
Where were we?
Right.
A system beats willpower every time. Especially when your willpower has the attention span of a squirrel near an open bag of chips.
Today is Day 30.
The final build.
And it is probably the one we should have shown you first, because the other twenty-nine builds have been quietly feeding into it the whole time.
We built our brain.
Then we made a smaller public version you can play with.
One window. The whole business.
Most small-business owners are not disorganised.
Their business is scattered.
Email in one tab.
Bookings in another.
Invoices somewhere nobody particularly enjoys visiting.
Customer notes inside a spreadsheet that has somehow become mission-critical infrastructure.
A CRM that is technically the Notes app.
Marketing ideas living entirely inside your head until 11pm on a Sunday.
A task list called FINAL-v3-use-this-one.
Fifteen browser tabs open, several of which have become emotionally load-bearing.
That is not a personal failure.
That is what happens when every part of running a business arrives as a separate login, a separate dashboard, a separate subscription, and a separate opportunity to forget why you opened the tab in the first place.
We got tired of it.
So we built one window that holds the lot.
We call it ADHD: the Attention Directed Holding Device.
Naming it after the problem felt more honest than pretending we are naturally organised people.
We are not.
We just stopped building a business that depends on us remembering everything.
The real version is what we run PlainBlack on
The full Attention Directed Holding Device is not a concept dashboard we mocked up for a social post.
It is the operating system we actually run PlainBlack on.
Our version is much deeper than the public demo.
It holds the moving parts of the business.
It connects the work.
It keeps the useful things visible.
It quietly removes a heap of decisions we were tired of making.
Capture a thought before it escapes.
Triage the pile in seconds.
Move work through a board.
See the day on a calendar.
Keep customers and invoices connected.
Schedule marketing.
Give the team one shared window.
Turn a quick note into a proper working document when a passing thought becomes an essay, a product idea, or an unnecessarily detailed rant about agency retainers.
The proper version does more than collect things in one place.
The useful parts talk to each other.
That is the point.
Not another dashboard.
Not another subscription.
Not another place to put information and then forget it exists.
One operating window for the actual business.
The public demo is the lighter version
Handing the full internal system over to the internet with a cheerful little "go nuts" would be slightly irresponsible.
So the public version is deliberately simplified.
Enough of the brain to understand the idea.
Enough of the moving parts to break, style, drag around, and imagine inside your own business.
But not the whole machine.
Think of it as the showroom model.
You can open the doors.
Sit in the seat.
Press the buttons.
Make engine noises if the moment takes you.
The proper build is the one wired around the way your business actually works.
What you can do inside the demo
The public version still gives you plenty to play with.
Capture a thought before it vanishes.
Make cards.
Drag work around.
Create customers.
Send a fake invoice.
Move through the calendar.
Add notes.
Recolour the interface.
Drop your logo and business name over ours.
Style it until it feels like your business.
There is also a tab called Replaces.
That one adds up the subscriptions you may already be paying for just to keep switching between them.
The total lands at roughly two hundred dollars a month.
Which is a fair bit of money to spend on the privilege of opening more tabs.
The catch, said plainly
The demo lives entirely inside your browser.
Nothing touches a server.
Nobody else can see your version.
You cannot see theirs.
And if you clear your browser storage, it disappears like it was never there.
So play freely.
Just do not become emotionally attached to your beautifully organised fake business.
The squirrel warning at the top says it better than we can.
A few things we could not help ourselves with
There is a Gmail-style panel containing the sort of emails every small-business owner knows slightly too well.
A supplier raising prices "due to the broader environment."
A customer who will definitely sort the invoice this week.
A five-star review that makes the whole day worth it.
Ask the built-in AI to explain a slow month and it will draft something beautifully corporate blaming the algorithm.
Then it will offer an alternative version blaming Mercury retrograde.
Inside the Finance tab, there is also an invoice.
From us.
To you.
For one million dollars.
The line item is, and we quote ourselves here:
Being fckn legends.
You can dispute it.
We have reviewed your dispute.
It has been respectfully declined.
Thirty days, honestly
Here is what thirty days of building in public actually taught us.
Beyond the obvious lesson that announcing a thirty-day challenge out loud is an excellent way to make your future self deeply suspicious of you.
The hard part is rarely the idea.
It is the follow-through.
It is finishing the useful thing after the exciting part has worn off.
It is returning to the half-built tool while another idea is waving enthusiastically from across the room.
It is shipping the rough version.
Fixing the broken bit.
Posting the numbers anyway.
The tools we are proudest of are not always the clever ones.
They are the boring ones that quietly remove a decision we were tired of making.
That is the job. Not more features. Fewer things rattling around inside your head.
We shipped imperfect builds.
We skipped a couple.
The laptop genuinely came close to leaving through a window during week two.
We posted the numbers either way, because a thirty-day challenge you can quietly fudge is not really a challenge.
It is a marketing campaign wearing a tracksuit.
So, here it is
Go and play with the public version of the Attention Directed Holding Device.
Break it.
Style it.
Load it with fake customers.
Send yourself a million-dollar invoice.
Imagine it holding your real customers, your real numbers, your real inbox, and the work that currently lives in six different places.
Then imagine opening one useful window in the morning instead of fifteen tabs and a spreadsheet you do not fully trust.
The demo is deliberately simple.
Our own system is much more capable.
And the real version we build for a business is not a copy-and-paste dashboard with a new logo slapped on it.
It is shaped around the way that business actually runs.
The tools worth keeping stay.
The subscriptions that should disappear get replaced.
The useful parts talk to each other.
The clutter gets cut.
No software bonfire for the sake of it.
No dashboard theatre.
Just one properly built operating window for the business you are actually running.
Thirty products.
Thirty days.
Built in public.
Tracked in public.
Occasionally held together with caffeine and language unsuitable for a quarterly shareholder meeting.
Challenge complete.
Now, if you will excuse us, there is a squirrel.