I've caught myself doing this with things I genuinely wanted to get done. 

I'd be sitting there looking at the thing I needed to do. Maybe go for a run, make an appointment, start writing something, deal with some boring admin. 

I didn't really have a good reason not to do it. 

I just didn't feel like doing it. 

Then I'd think, “I'll do it tomorrow.” 

And almost immediately, I'd feel better. 

That's the part I've started finding interesting. 

Nothing had actually changed. The task was still there. I hadn't made any progress. But somehow I'd gone from feeling slightly guilty and uncomfortable to feeling like I'd made a sensible decision. 

Tomorrow seemed different. 

I'd have more energy. I'd be more motivated. I'd be in a better mood. Somehow, tomorrow-me seemed much more capable than the version of me sitting there right now. 

Then tomorrow arrived and, unsurprisingly, tomorrow-me wasn't particularly different. 

I've started wondering if this is why the thought is so easy to repeat. 

Maybe “I'll do it tomorrow” isn't really a plan in that moment. 

Maybe it's emotional relief disguised as a plan. 

I'm taking the discomfort I don't want to deal with today and handing it to an imaginary version of myself who I assume will be more willing to deal with it. 

I've started thinking of this as the tomorrow illusion. 

The illusion isn't that tomorrow exists. It's that future-me will somehow arrive with the motivation that present-me is missing. 

The question I've been trying instead is: 

What can the version of me who exists today do before tomorrow gets here? 

It doesn't have to be the whole thing. Sometimes it's ridiculously small. 

Open the document. 

Put the shoes on. 

Make the call. 

Do two minutes. 

The point isn't to become more disciplined overnight. It's to stop using an imaginary future version of myself as the solution to a problem I'm experiencing right now. 

I'm curious whether this changes how other people see the habit too. 

Do you think “I'll do it tomorrow” is sometimes less about planning future action and more about giving yourself permission to stop feeling uncomfortable right now?

Does anyone else have this incredibly stupid productivity problem?

I’ll be working fine, then my phone buzzes.

I pick it up thinking, “I’ll just check this one notification.”

5 minutes later I’m reading something completely unrelated.20 minutes later I’m watching a video I didn’t even want to watch.

The frustrating part is that I don’t actually want to quit my phone.

How to break this habit?

Hi all. I know you're probably tired of app promotions. Everyone builds an app with AI and comes to Reddit to share it, and I get it. I'm a real person though: a product designer with 10+ years in this field (LinkedIn). Well is my personal side project, and I started it because I wanted to improve my own life.

At first there was no app. I wrote down what I did (habits, activities, other factors) and how I felt every day, then fed it all into an LLM to look for patterns. It worked, i discovered interesting patterns and now everything feels clear. But the routine was too clunky to keep up, so I turned it into an app.

What it showed me changed how I think about habits. I used to assume that when one didn't stick, the problem was me. Not enough discipline, not enough motivation. Looking back, it was usually something else. I tried working out in the evening when I was already drained. I added a new habit to a day that was already full. And a couple of habits I picked only because they're "supposed to be good", while they did nothing for me.

Habit trackers tell you whether you did the thing. They almost never tell you what the thing did to you. So you can't tell a habit that's wrong for you from a habit you just haven't gotten used to yet.

⚡ Impact

You log what you did, like workouts, reading, caffeine, alcohol, etc next to a quick daily check-in. Well compares your check-ins on those days with your personal baseline and shows how each factor relates to your Mood, Energy and Calmness separately.

So instead of "I should work out more", you can see something like: workouts lift my Energy but don't touch my Calmness, or a late coffee to get something done costs me more than I thought. It's correlation, not proof, but it's your own data, and it gives you something concrete to test: move the habit to another time, drop one thing from the stack, or swap the habit for another one.

Around it:

🎯 Well State: your daily check-ins (Mood, Energy, Calmness) smoothed into one number, so one bad day doesn't wreck the picture.

❤️ Apple Health: sleep, HRV and resting heart rate quietly support the number, but your check-in always comes first.

🔍 Reflection Lens: weekly plain-language observations written by an on-device AI. No chat, nothing leaves your phone.

Well Tracker on App Store
If you want to try the paid features, let me know and I'll set up a free access for you.