Why I Built Almost There, Even Though I Hate Apps That Want My Attention Every Day

We live in a time when a person is overwhelmed from every direction — paperwork, notifications, information, obligations that often aren't even truly ours, we just picked them up somewhere along the way. We operate on several levels at once and there is always something to keep track of. When, in that state, I come across an app that presents itself as a clever, useful helper, and then I find out I would have to give it even just a few minutes a day for it to work — something in me tightens. I don't want to take on another commitment. Sometimes I feel the opposite: the need to put technology away entirely for a week and live simply for a while, without interruptions — making room for rest, for thinking, for movement, for screen-free rituals, for real attention given to the people around me.

The One App I Open Every Day

There is only one app I do open daily — Duolingo. Learning languages makes sense to me, and it finds the spare time by itself — a moment on the balcony in the sun, a bus ride, waiting for anything at all. I have its notifications switched off. I open it when I want to, not when it tells me to. That is where my line is: an app that knows how to wait deserves a place in my day. An app that chases me does not — no matter how clever what it offers might sound (calorie counting is the classic example).

So why did I go and build a tool whose whole point is daily participation?

What Almost There Does

Almost There is a goal planning tool. You enter a goal and the date by which you want it done, and the app turns that into a path — it splits it into phases by month, those into weeks, and the nearest weeks into concrete tasks for each day. The difference from an ordinary to-do list is that you don't write it yourself. The app knows how much time is left until the deadline and how much of it you realistically have, and it lays the work out accordingly.

Why the App Came About

I built it because I keep seeing the same pattern in myself and in the people around me. Either we don't set goals at all, because we've grown used to achieving nothing and letting circumstances carry us along. Or we carry them in our heads as "some day…", without a real deadline that turns a wish into a decision. Or we take only occasional steps towards them and have no overview of where we actually are and what needs to be done next.

A goal that exists only as an occasional daydream is almost impossible to truly fulfil. Almost There makes it concrete right in front of your eyes — and gives you a clear, small step for every day, thanks to which you eventually arrive where you wanted to be, at the time you wanted.

The Exception to My Own Rule

Here is the difference that let me make an exception to my own rule: the time you put into the app each day comes back to you as a significantly higher chance of achieving something you genuinely care about. It isn't extra time carved out of your day — it's the time that holds together all the other time you invest in the goal. Without structure, that time almost always dissolves.

So the Helper Doesn't Become Another Pressure

And because I know how easily a helper turns into yet another source of pressure, I made sure that doesn't happen to Almost There. If you don't complete a task one day, nothing happens — the "Can't today" button simply moves it, with no shame and no fuss. The app doesn't track you for the sake of tracking; it speaks up only when, over two weeks, it notices three days without movement, and even then it only offers, never imposes — either catch up on the slippage, or honestly move the deadline to the pace you actually have. The daily entry for looking back at your day can be set to zero minutes. No competing, no "streaks" that punish you for having had a bad week.

So Almost There doesn't want your attention just for the sake of having it. It wants it only for as long as it needs to get you where you said you wanted to go — and then to quietly disappear from the path.

Almost There costs 179 CZK a month. If you too carry a goal in your head that is still waiting for "some day", you can try what it would be like to finally have it laid out day by day — at almost-there.eu.