🤔 Emoji Every Day is my small product with a big philosophy.
Over the past year, I've shared my small products here about five times. But today I'm sharing something I'm truly proud of, because Emoji Every Day is a case where the idea behind the product is much more important than the execution.
I'll start with something I wrote about three months ago: twice a day, Alexa asks me a simple question: "How are you feeling?"
And I answer honestly, and not in the form of "I want something"—wanting isn't a feeling. I answer: "I'm bored." Or: "Inspired." Or: "My neck is tired." So, that's two minutes a day that I dedicate to connecting with myself.
I recently saw another beautiful calendar, and you know, I love calendars that are colored in some way, like a heat map, like the one on GitHub. I thought: what if I put a different emoji on my calendar every day? And then—wow!—the thought evolved:
- Which one? Choosing from the same faces will get boring.
- I can choose from all of them.
- And to avoid choice overload, someone will first give me a random 10.
- How do I choose from random ones?
- Oh, but I'll have to think about that!
And here another point of contact with myself was born: which emoji am I today? No, when there's a 🍆, 🥒, or 🌚—of course, no sane person will have any questions about which emoji they are today. But what if there are 👹, 6️⃣, 🇨🇻, ⛈, 🌔, 🍔, 👨🌾, 🟩, 🕞, and ➖—what do we choose? A challenge to think about, to touch myself!
And I really liked it. And then a few others did too. Then I added emoji battles, just as a side activity, and many people really liked it.
And then I figured out how to turn this thing into a tracker without a tracker. You see, habit trackers are another one of my pet peeves: as soon as I start using them, I start kidding myself. Like, why give my day a C when I haven't had a single C all month... And instead of the tool giving me feedback—"Take it easy, bro"—the tool turns into another distorted mirror.
So, if you're interested in tinkering with it, tinker with the emojis today. The product is currently in the MVP stage, there aren't even any notifications—and over the weekend I'll be thinking about how to add subtle notifications to a quiet product. Because Emoji Every Day's mission is to give you one minute of mindfulness a day, not just another chore you want to skip in frustration.