How I Manage My Entire Life with a Custom App I Built in Claude Code
Channel: Jerad Hill Video: Watch on YouTube
Jerad Hill built a custom app in Claude Code to manage his entire life — tasks, notes, schedules, and personal workflows. This video walks through what he built, how he built it, and the philosophy behind using Claude Code for personal productivity tools.
Full Transcript
Hey, it’s Jared. After years of trying to put together my own productivity system, I finally decided to build one in Claude Code. And if you’ve watched any of my videos in the past, you’ve seen different things that I’ve done with Notion and different apps that I’ve used, whether it be on an iPhone or an iPad or an Android phone. I’ve jumped around quite a bit just trying to figure out the way that would be best to get the information that I need into a tool so that I can keep myself organized.
Now, I have a couple different areas in my life that I have to jump between. And that might be making YouTube videos. It might be building websites or working on marketing campaigns for clients. And then there’s my family and everything else. And I’ve got all of these different things that I want to manage. But no tool has really been able to tie everything together for me. And so I decided to give it a go and see if I could build something out in Cloud Code.
Frictionless Capture
And let me just show you how it works to capture some of the information and the frictionless-ness. This is where it really works for my life. The friction of getting information into a system is what prevents me from using the actual system. And I’ve talked about this in other videos, but this system is about as frictionless as you can get right now.
So, first things first, I have my Apple Watch on my wrist and I have a shortcut here. All I have to do is tap on this shortcut and then choose capture to dashboard. And then I can do something like this:
“Schedule a task for home to change out the water filter and the refrigerator at 2 p.m. tomorrow.”
And then I hit done and it’s going to go ahead and capture that to my dashboard. Now, this is a complete tool that I’m going to walk through and show you some of the features. I’m going to talk about how I built it, but ultimately I have all these different areas of my life, whether it be home or work, which facet of my work, different other things that I’m involved in.
And all of those things could be projects, but they’re not just projects. They’re also areas. And some projects are time based. Like I might be working on something for a deliverable that might last a couple of weeks or a month. And then there are some ongoing type of projects that have recurring tasks every month. These were challenges that I couldn’t really overcome in Notion or other tools. I could build something out, but it would become so elaborate and overdone that the friction to getting the information into the system was just too much at times, which means I wasn’t going to use it.
Web Interface — Tasks
So, if we jump over to the web interface here and I go ahead and click on tasks, I could just refresh the page here. Click on tasks. You can see here we’ve got “change out water filter and refrigerator.” It assigned it to home, gave it a due date of tomorrow at 2 p.m. I didn’t tell it to give me a reminder. Otherwise, it would have given me a reminder. So, we’ll just go ahead and set a reminder for it. That’s something that I’m going to adjust to have it just automatically add a reminder unless I tell it not to.
So then that’s saved. This is not an actual app. Like, I didn’t develop an app. This is a web app that I saved to my home screen. And it loads things up. You can see I have a notification right here letting me know that I just added a new task. And so if I click on that, I can see task created. And so any new item that I add is going to be in here just so that I can easily see the items that I recently added to my system. And I can tap on this, of course, and edit it the same way that I did on my desktop computer.
But you’ll notice here on the phone, we have a couple of different ways that we can enter things into the system as well. Of course, on the Apple Watch, that’s not an app. That’s simply a shortcut that runs on the Apple Watch, triggers a few things, records the voice, transcribes the voice into text, ingests that into the system using AI, and it would rewrite that appropriately. So that way, it’s not just my blurb of text. Like, it’s not going to also include my H or ums, like if I’m kind of thinking out my process. It’s actually going to filter all of that out and rewrite it and put it into the system assigning it where it needs to go appropriately. So I don’t have to go in there and do that manually.
Of course, the reason for the notifications is so that I can go and check just to make sure. Have a really quick way of looking and saying, “Oh yeah, all the things that I added today went where they’re supposed to go.” But there’s so much more that this can do.
It’s not only my task and project manager, but it’s how I manage things that I want to remember about people and different interactions. There’s a library that includes my notes, journal, and all sorts of other things. We’ll get into that here in a second.
Journal & Voice Capture
Here’s some recent entries. And one of those recent journal entries would be about how we spent Memorial Day. And if I tap on that, we’ve got exactly what we did. We’ve got some photos that I took on my device as well. This was also added via voice. And then I came back and uploaded a couple of photos so that I can have those in this journal entry. And so from the web app on my phone, I can use voice entries in a similar way that I did on the Apple Watch.
So let’s go ahead and enter another task:
“Add a task to home to check the oil on the car tomorrow at 4:00 p.m. Set an alert for 5 minutes.”
All right. And then we’ll go ahead and check. And we can see here that it set the alert for 5 minutes before and scheduled that task. And so I can do that via voice here. This isn’t actually using a shortcut. This is going directly into the interface. And then I also have the ability to enter things via text as well for those instances where I don’t want to speak into the microphone.
Browser Interface — Today Screen
So let’s take a look at the browser interface. I have my today screen here, which gives me my top three tasks for the day. These are the three things that I want to accomplish every day. And then any other tasks that I get done can come after that. I can add a task to my top three by going ahead and tapping the star and it goes ahead and adds that up here. And then when I get items done, I can check them off.
I also have my calendar entries. And this is actually pulling in from Google Calendar. My tasks and projects are actually built into the system and managed within this system. But I’m not going to change using Google Calendar. There’s too many good things about using that standard calendar. So, this simply pulls in everything from Google Calendar using the Google Calendar API and it all runs in the background and updates whenever there are new things added.
And then down here we have all open tasks and they’re sorted by due date.
Slipping Section
Over on the right hand side we have this area called “slipping.” Now, one of the things that was a struggle for me is if there was a project that I didn’t get some work done in a certain amount of time, there was no easy way for me to be notified unless I simply scheduled reminders in there to remind me to check in on it. Now, there are some ways to do this in project management tools, but it’s very specific to a certain type of workflow, and it’s not flexible across all areas of my life. I always found myself trying to fit personal tasks and different things into a system that was built for business workflows so that I could have everything in one place and it just didn’t work out too well.
So, this area will update if a project goes a certain amount of time without having been looked at or worked on. And it’s not just projects, it’s also tasks and other areas as well.
Routines & Streak Tracker
I have my routine checklist here. Now, what I used to do was put my routine items like take my vitamins, check my email, and stuff like that. Those daily routines would just also be reminders. And so, I’d have all of those mashed together with tasks and other reminders, and it was just a big mess. And so, I’d open that up and it’s like, man, what an overwhelming vat of stuff that I’ve got to go through. Okay, a lot of those are just routine type of things. Maybe I can sort those a different way or set up different views, but then I’ve got to jump around and there is no easy global way to look at everything without everything being all jumbled together in some sort of unified inbox.
And so now I can view all of these items here separately. I can toggle these off and you can see I have a streak tracker over here on the right hand side. And this particular task was scheduled for the morning. And you can see that since it’s in the afternoon, we’ve missed the morning. And I’m going to go ahead and toggle this one off. And that updates the streak tracker and then crosses it off and I have just my evening routine tasks left.
Resurfacing & Daily Inspiration
Now down here under resurfacing, one journal entry, quote, or saved verse rotates here daily. Right now one is not populating in here but I can have a quote saved from a book or some sort of note that I favored will show up in this section and it’ll rotate giving me a new piece of inspiration every single day.
If I scroll down there’s items that need my review. Perhaps I created a note and there was some sort of action item in that note that was identified by AI as needing to be reviewed at a later date. It’s going to go ahead and automatically check that for me and it’ll show up in this section. And that way I don’t miss out on something that I logged that I wanted to revisit later because I know I have so many notes that I had in my Apple Notes app or in Notion that I entered and then they just go there to die. There’s nothing there that would invoke me to revisit that. This system solves for that.
And then down at the bottom, we have those notifications as well.
Keyboard Shortcuts & Search
Now, there’s a keyboard shortcut on the computer, command J, which is that text capture. So, just like I showed you the text capture on the phone, I can do that easily on the computer. I also have a global search option. So, I can come in here and search for something like say I’ll just search for “daughter,” maybe something about my daughter. And then I have any notes that mention that, any quotes that mention that, and of course any other section from my library that would mention the word daughter is going to show up there.
AI Chat
I can also ask, and since this system is using the Anthropic API, I can chat with all of the information that’s in my system here. So any information in my database within this dashboard, I can chat and get answers back from it. And so as I add more and more information to this, there’s going to be more context for it to work from. And it already has a ton of context because I imported all of my notes from my other notes applications. And so there’s hundreds of notes already in here and quotes from books and journal entries that I’ve been accumulating over time.
Settings & Integrations
And then there’s a settings page, which this is where I would make sure that my connection to Google Calendar is working and I can see when it was last synced. And I can force a sync if for some reason things don’t seem updated. I could change my time zone if I want. And then I can check all the integration connections and make sure that they’re working as well. So I get a little check mark here to let me know that everything is connected and working. This would be the first place that I would go if something just wasn’t working the way that it should.
Task Management Features
So if we go under tasks, I have a whole bunch of different sort options. I can sort by open, done, or all. And by project or area as well. And you can see it sorts all of these by when they’re due. And if I click on one of those, we have that interface that we already looked at. But I can connect these to a project/area. So whether it’s a work project or an area of my life, I can connect the task to that. I can set a priority as well. I can also connect these to a content item. And we’ll talk about content items here in a second. I can set reminders. And these reminders actually send push notifications.
So if I go back to my iPhone and unlock it, and let’s just swipe down from the top here, you can see Pushover. It’s actually an app and an API that allows me to connect my dashboard system to Pushover and then it sends push notifications. So you can see here two hours ago, which would have been noon, I got a notification that I didn’t start my journal entry. That was that routine item on the today page that we saw that was missed. I got a notification about that. I also got notifications about other tasks. And then I also get a daily summary. And I can come into the app and see all of those notifications as well.
How neat is this that I can see all of my tasks and their schedules right here without having to scroll through a massive list. I could just look at everything and say, “Okay, this is what my morning is going to look like based on how I scheduled out my tasks for the day.” So, very easy to organize all of those things and get those notifications so that I don’t miss anything.
And you can also see here that I have the ability to set tasks as recurring. So that way a task will just be automatically generated again once I complete it.
Routines Deep Dive
Now routines is a huge one and I already talked a little bit about the separation of routines and tasks. I have a set of routines that I’m going to go through every single day and I want to be able to look at those morning, afternoon, and evening and check those off. But I also have routines that I might want to do for a certain period of time. Think about those streak tracker apps that allow you to set up a 30-day streak for something or just set an ongoing streak so that you can check those items off every single day. That’s essentially what this is. But I can use it in both of those ways.
I just simply give it a name, a description if I’d like, the time of day, whether it’s morning, afternoon, or evening, or anytime. I can set a specific time if I would like, choose whether or not I want it to send a notification, and then if this is an ongoing streak or if it’s for a specific time frame, and then I can manually type in a custom amount of days, too, if I would like. So, for example, in June, I want to run a 5K every single day for the month of June. And so, I can set a 30-day recurring routine that will start on the first day of June. And I can check those off. And then after that’s over, I will have archived items that start to show up below. So I can go and view all of my completed streaks, which will be fun to see over time. And then I have this bar graph up here that’s going to update. Obviously, I just added this feature about five or six days ago. And so I just have a little bit of data here, but I’ll be able to see the ebb and flow of my progress with trying to maintain habits and routines.
Projects & Areas
Now projects, this is an area that was a huge struggle for me when I was using Notion. I have active projects and retainers and different areas of my life. A project is something that has an end date. It might be a website that I’m building for a client and after about 30 days I’ll be done with that. There’s things that I need to track in regards to that project.
And then there’s retainer items. There’s clients that I do ongoing work for and it was always hard to use a standard project management system for that because a retainer often has things that recur every single month and I’d have to go in and manually create either recurring tasks or I’d have to manually add new items every single month and it was just a real chore to get that done.
So, if I’m looking at a one-time project, I can set milestones in here. I can add new milestones and it gives me a percentage of completion on those milestones. I can also add tasks here which go into my main tasks database or my main tasks area, but then they’re also linked to this project. I can add checklists. And what’s great is I can create checklist templates as well. So when I create a new project, if it’s for building out a website, there might be a certain amount of things that I go through every single time. Checklist like make sure I get access to the domain name, set up the hosting environment, install WordPress, whatever it is that I’m going to be doing through that process. I can just go through that checklist and I don’t have to add that every single time.
And then I can also log my activity as well, like what have I been working on, how long have I been working on it, and then it will update here in the hours showing me how many hours I’ve worked on that project, which time tracking is good just to make sure that I’m not spending too much time on a project because I’m definitely prone to that. And then if it is a project where I’m actually billing for my hours, I’m tracking all of that information here.
But then there’s also retainer items as well, which has open tasks that I might do every single month and also checklist items. And these are things that I do every month. And so if I had to come back and add these things again, whether it be weekly or monthly, it would be time-consuming. And this area works a little bit differently in the sense where I set things up recurring, whether they’re tasks or checklist. It’s going to automatically reload those at the beginning of the month, and it’ll also save the ones that might have been overdue.
And then I have a section that falls outside of projects. They’re not a typical project that I’d be working on for someone else, but it’s an area in which I spend time, whether it be in the home or with Hill Media Group or other projects of mine. It makes it really easy for me to add tasks and assign them to something for organization. And even to be able to go back and look and see the history is great as well.
When I go to create a new project or a new area, I have those two options up here. A new project can be a project or it can be an area project. And then under engagement, it could be a project or a retainer. So I can just simply change these and everything updates here on the fly giving me different options. And when it saves everything, it saves it accordingly so that the project will work the way it’s supposed to moving forward.
Content Pipeline
Now the content section is more specific to me as a person who creates YouTube videos and writes article content. I have videos that I’m working on here and I can keep tabs on my videos where they’re at, whether they’re published or editing or I’m waiting on something. It makes it really easy for me to see what I’m working on.
Now, I had built something like this in Notion and it perhaps was the most useful part of Notion for me was just keeping tabs on where I’m at on different videos, but this is much cleaner and it integrates with my tasks, project management, and having everything all-in-one definitely makes it easier.
So, this is a published video. This is the actual YouTube video embedded here. And then tasks that are associated. I don’t have any tasks. They’re all completed. Here’s a checklist that I went through of the process from outlining to publishing and promoting the video. I’ve got the title, what type of content it is — video, article, podcast, newsletter. I’ve got the publish status here. But if it’s not published yet, maybe it’s an idea. I haven’t even started working on it yet. I can leave it in the idea status or move it through the different statuses here and then move it on to done when I’m done with the video which essentially this one is done.
I can connect it to a specific channel or domain and so I have my different YouTube channels and different life domains here as well. So couple of YouTube channels in here, my Substack, Hill Media Group, and so I can assign the content to one of those different areas. I could put the video URL if there is one or the article URL. Here’s the publish date. And then there’s a box down here that supports markdown that allows me to work on my outline and have all of that information here. So I have all the information about this video or article in one spot.
People & Relationships (Personal CRM)
And then I have the people section which is my relationships database. And this is kind of like a personal CRM. Now in one of my recent posts to Substack, I mentioned wanting to be more intentional and trying to do better at memorizing and remembering important information about the people closest to me. And I improved that process by actually writing those things down in my journal.
I have a daily journal that I handwrite and I write down information there. I feel like writing things down with a pen and paper is one of the best ways to commit that to memory. But then it’s in a journal, maybe several pages back, maybe it’s in an earlier edition of one of my journals that’s now on the shelf. That information is not readily available to me. So I put that information into this system.
And to give you an idea of what that looks like, I can log information in here that might be facts about that person, like a birthday, anniversary, something about one of their kids, a shared interest, a follow-up, or something like that. And then I can also log interactions that I’ve had with them as well. Now, I’m not going to get too carried away with this, but I am going to put important things in there that I don’t want to forget. So that way, if there’s something that comes to my mind about that person, I’m not going to forget it.
Library — Notes, Journal, Quotes, Books
Now, if I jump down to library, this section has a lot going on. Now, I like to keep tabs on notes, journal entries, and quotes that I found, whether they be in a book or from a podcast or something that I heard. And I also read a lot of books on Kindle, and I highlight different items that I want to remember there as well. And I wanted a place where all of these things could come together and live, and I can access all of them.
So, under my library, I can view all of my notes, which includes journal entries, quotes, and all sorts of stuff. But then I can come through and view these individually and they all have sorting that is specific to that content type.
So under notes I have the source like where did it come from and then I also have tags that can be added to this as well. And so when I view one of these, this was something that I added in a concept from a book that I was reading. And so I can associate that to that book. I can add some tags. I can flag it for review if I want to come back. I can even add an image.
I can then go to quotes. And this is all quotes with their own specific sorts as well. I could even sort by book and whether or not it was from an article, podcast, a conversation, or anything like that. And then there’s also tags specific to these as well. And when I click on one of these, I can view the quote. I can also view my thought about the quote as well. And I can add multiple thoughts. And so I can add a feed. So, as I revisit quotes and maybe think about things differently or how I might have implemented something from that into my life, I can put that in here and keep tabs on that, which is super useful.
There’s a little bit less here with the journal entry. A journal entry is just an entry of text and maybe a couple of photos or a small video clip just like this. And most of these are going to be added via voice. And so most of the time I am journaling in an actual written journal with a pen and paper. But like I said, that paper ends up going on the shelf and it’s not easy to go back and revisit those things. And so if there’s anything insightful from a specific day, something that I want to remember, I’ll go ahead and enter it here. And the next thing I’m working on is actually just being able to take a picture of that page and have AI automatically pull out all of those insights and automatically add them into the journal for me.
Any book that I’ve read, especially Kindle books, it’s really easy to pull those in. Automatically have the book cover pulled in as well with the title, the author, the cover image, the status of the book, whether I want to read it, I’m reading it, finished it, or I abandoned the book, what the format was, when I started reading the book, when I finished reading the book. I can give it a rating. I could even put in the ISBN, which isn’t super useful for this, but it’s information that could be pulled in. And then I can give my summary and notes on the book here. And then it’s also going to show all of the individual highlights. And all of these highlights are individual quotes which then can have their own thoughts underneath them. And all of these highlights are automatically pulled in when I save one of those highlights in a Kindle book. When I’m done with that book, I can then sync all of those over into the system. And then I have all of them here. And when I view one of these quotes, I can come in and add some thoughts to it as well.
Inventory (Upcoming Feature)
And then the inventory section, which I haven’t built out yet, is going to make it easy for me to keep tabs on all of the different things that I own. Think about the situation where you end up having a house or an office fire. And you have to go through and try and remember all of the different things that you had and make an inventory list to provide to insurance. I want to make that extremely easy using this system where I can log all of that stuff, have a photo of it, and make it really easy should I have any issue. But it’s not only just for that. It’s also just to make sure that I don’t end up having things sitting around that I’m no longer using. I can go in here and look at the date that it was added in. And then I can also pull things out of inventory as well. And I don’t want to have a bunch of stuff sitting around that I’m not using, especially if it’s something that I could sell while it still has some value. And this system is going to help me be a better steward of the things that I purchase and a steward of my resources for when it’s time to get rid of them.
Domain Areas
Lastly, we have the different domain areas of my life. And this is the highest level in which all things are connected. There’s domains, projects, tasks, and routine. And all of those trickle down from a domain area. And so the domain areas would be my Field Notes, Hill Media Group, a couple of my different YouTube channels, my photography business, Site Nitro. And so these are the top level areas in which everything else falls within individually.
How He Built It (The Development Process)
Now, like I said, I built this in Claude. And so initially I started out in a Claude chat talking about the different areas of my life and the ways that I organize things. We had a conversation about that and I had it ask me questions so that it can better understand how I want to organize things because it’s really hard to kind of map all that stuff out and I could do it on paper but having a conversation with a Claude chat was what helped me kind of figure out how those things need to be organized and verbalize those things and then have it come back and say, “Well, it might be kind of hard to tie those things together. What about this?” And I’d say, nah, that doesn’t work for me. And we’d work towards something that ended up working out.
And the result of that was a full spec document that we created that had everything that this tool needed. From there, we took the spec document and then brought it into Claude Design. And in Claude Design is where we worked on all of the design aspects and everything about the system, including what each of the pages were going to look like, the voice capture flow, what that was going to look like, the different domain areas, how projects were going to look, the content pipeline, and everything else.
Now, there’s some features that haven’t been completely built out yet, like the Kanban view of content. I don’t have that built out yet. And like I said, the inventory hasn’t been built out either.
But after we figured out this design, I had a bunch of design files and I was able to download those files and then upload the design files and the scope document into Claude Code and start building.
Now, it wasn’t one click and ship. It wasn’t ready to go initially without a whole bunch of chat. You can see here that as I scroll through the entire chat that I’ve had with Claude on building this out, it is quite an interaction and it’s involved everything from getting started with the initial files to the dashboard that would run locally on my computer into getting everything moved into a web interface that would allow me to connect to it whether I was on my home network connected to the laptop or I was out running around only with my Apple Watch.
Hosting & Infrastructure
Now I’m hosting this NodeJS project with ExCloud. I use ExCloud for hosting a bunch of websites, including a bunch of my client websites, and it’s worked out really well. It’s not the perfect environment for what I’m doing here, but it works really well and it’s been super stable. It’s been really easy to push features and updates from Claude Code directly to the platform and then have features ready to use regardless of which device that I’m on.
The database is running in Supabase and so Supabase is where all the data is stored and then ExCloud is where the infrastructure is hosted and accessed from. And then I connected everything to an actual website address so that it’s easy for me to access this from anywhere. And it’s username and password protected along with authentication to keep everything safe.
The Philosophy & Final Advice
So I know for a fact that there’s no other tool out there that will do something like this without writing a bunch of code or customizing something into oblivion where the friction to actually using the system becomes so great that you end up needing to abandon it. That’s been my track record with other tools that are out there. They’re great tools, but their use case isn’t for someone’s entire life. And I don’t want to be jumping around between different tools. So, I decided to build my own.
And because I have a little bit of a development background and can think that way and have access to Claude Code, I was able to develop this entire system within a couple of days and start implementing it into my life.
And so, I’m making this video really just to share that the possibilities are kind of endless these days. There are so many different things that you can do. In a matter of a couple of days, I built a system that was impossible for me to build with any other tool and still have it be useful. I’m able to access that from either my computer, my phone, a tablet. I’m able to post updates to it from my watch. These are things that I couldn’t do with any other tool.
And for me, these tools aren’t about implementing my life into them. It’s trying to be the best steward of the things that I have in my life and make sure that I stay organized so that nothing slips through the cracks. The tools should get out of my way so that I can stay focused and not spend half of my day trying to figure out where I’m at on a project or what needs updating.
So, I’ll probably share a few additional things about this in my Substack. So, if you’re interested in that, make sure to check out the link in the description and subscribe to that for free. If you have any questions about what I built, I’ll try to answer them in the description below.
But, if I could give you one piece of advice on getting started with something like this, it’s just to go into a Claude chat and start having a conversation. Share the things that you’re trying to accomplish. Explain them. Talk about how you’re doing them right now and what friction points there are, frustrations that you’re experiencing all the time, and work on figuring out what a system would look like that would work specific to your needs. And then eventually start working on a scope document. And once you have that document, look through it, spend some time with it, and figure out if it’s going to solve all of your problems or if it’s simply going to add to them. Because you could really easily create something that becomes a friction point and a frustration in your life once again, and you don’t want that.
But that’s where I’m going to end this video for today. Thanks so much for watching. Hope you enjoyed it. Give it a thumbs up, subscribe to the channel, and we’ll see you back soon. Take care.