JIKO App

Productivity web app to monitor your focus sessions in real time and track your long-term performance trends.

Status: In closed testing. This page will expand with more details as JIKO reaches its version 1.0 release.

Coming Soon

About

JIKO is a gamified productivity app designed to track focus sessions and visualize personal growth on the things that you really care about.

Track an exercise objective, a reading habit, or how long a side project is taking. Instead of guessing, JIKO provides you with an honest record of your own progress over time, surfacing data that you can look back on and actually improve from, through a simple loop of completing tasks, analyzing progress, and reviewing your objectives.

The word "jiko" (自己) in Japanese refers to "self/oneself", and the phrase "jiko kaizen" translates to a methodology of "continuous self-improvement". The app name refers to the broader Kaizen philosophy that can be applied directly to our personal lives, careers, or skill-building. The philosophy states a few central pillars:

• The 1% Rule: Instead of chasing sudden, overnight transformations, focus on getting just 1% better every day.
• Consistency over Intensity: Reading just 5 pages a day or waking up 10 minutes earlier is more effective than attempting to study for 6 hours and burning out.
• Process over Outcome: Fall in love with the daily habits and systems rather than fixating solely on the end goal.
• Eliminate Waste: Identify and remove bad habits, distractions, and inefficiencies in your daily routine.

JIKO's vision is to make your consistency visible, through transparent, ongoing records of the small daily choices that add up over time.

We live in a time that everything wants your attention, and we are constantly bombarded with distractions that can make it increasingly hard to hold your focus. JIKO was inspired by other apps like Duolingo, Habit, Structured, Focus Friend, Focus To-Do, and Habitos: tools that provided creative references when building an experience that empowers your focus and personal growth decisions.

JIKO is a direct evolution of my earlier Trofy project, rebuilt as a web app instead of a native mobile app using Unity. Maintaining and releasing across both Android and iOS had become too much complexity for a solo developer to sustain, and the move to web meant no longer depending on one commercial engine. The transition pushed me to grow into an entirely new area of development, with a structure that's proven far more agile, easier to manage, and scalable to keep building alone. While Trofy leaned heavily into gamification and one fixed methodology for tracking tasks for everyone, JIKO adapts to however someone actually wants to track their own goals. The app still carries some of that gamified DNA, just now as a subtle layer supporting the experience and the user loop.

Concepts

JIKO was envisioned and engineered with three major guiding concepts:

#1 Personal growth tool

JIKO turns personal improvement wishes into concrete objectives you can actually track. Check in on your ongoing habits and make decisions based on your own performance data. Learn a new skill, cut down on distractions, or eat healthier; understand whether you're actually trending upward or downward over time.

The current version of JIKO already includes a basic progress chart on the dashboard as a first step. The full Analytics features are currently under development, as I collect more feedback from real usage.

#2 Gamified experience

Staying motivated over time can be hard, even when you're genuinely committed to a goal. JIKO's use of gamified elements was a deliberate, carefully scoped choice: enough to give that motivation a small push without turning the whole experience into a game.

JIKO's design includes contrasting colors to direct your attention, animated feedback for your actions, and progress bars to build anticipation of completing an objective. Together, these create a more engaging experience that directly supports building better habits.

#3 Lightweight and fast to use

Every device has a clock-timer feature nowadays, and anyone can easily time a task and jot it down on a notepad or spreadsheet. JIKO was designed to be a faster, frictionless alternative that keeps everything in one place, built to get out of your way so you can get to doing what you actually care about.

Stack

JIKO runs on a lean monolith: Ruby on Rails deployed on Railway with PostgreSQL as the single source of truth. No micro-services, no unnecessary moving parts. Every push to main runs through a GitHub Actions pipeline that tests and deploys in one step.

A few architectural decisions behind the project so far:

• One flexible data model.
  A single Objective record, with an optional target frequency and set of applicable days, can represent a fixed weekly goal, a recurring habit, or a simple standalone group. No separate tables or duplicated logic.
• Hotwire over a heavier JS framework.
  Server-rendered views with Turbo Streams handle inline editing and specific partial refreshes, keeping the client-side lightweight while the interface still feels fast and responsive, especially on mobile.
• Tests run on every push.
  An RSpec suite with over 260 tests runs in CI via GitHub Actions before any code reaches production.
• A single design token system.
  Colors, spacing, and typography are defined once in a shared token file and consumed consistently across every view; the same approach used across my other projects.
• AI-assisted development, on human-led foundations.
  I designed the architecture, data model, and UX decisions myself, and implemented TDD from the very start of the project. AI tools were introduced later to help implement and iterate on new features, always under my direction and review.

Plan

JIKO moved through (1) Design & Documentation, (2) MVP Development, and is now in (3) Feature Polish & User Testing phase. The next step of the project is to implement Analytics Tools to close the user experience loop before a full V1.0 release.

This is the piece that completes the loop. A first version already lives on the dashboard as a basic progress chart, but the next phase is to evolve that into a full set of Analytics features, surfacing your own historical data back to you so decisions about your personal growth are based on evidence, not guesswork or vague feelings of progress. It's the feature that will unlock the app's full potential.

JIKO is my personal life project. It's the evolution of decades of tracking my own personal growth. This is just the beginning of a tool I fully intend to keep developing and perfecting for years to come.

I appreciate your interest and I hope to hear your experience with JIKO so we can build the best tool possible to help others with their own personal improvement goals.

Thank you for checking out this project!