What Is Surlesol And Why I Built It

Thursday, February 03, 2022

Introduction

I've created a web app called Surlesol. In this post I'll tell you why I built Surlesol and how I use it in my own pursuit for self-improvement. I'll also touch on where I plan to take the app — and the company. Whether you're a self-improvement aficionado or a tech-savvy individual looking to take your productivity workflow to the next level, please read on.

So, What Exactly is Surlesol?

"We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence then, is not an act, but a habit."

~ Will Durant

Surlesol is a framework for building new habits. Its core functionality allows you to track recurring items in a novel manner. To track recurring items, Surlesol uses an algorithm to prioritize every task, sorting everything from most important to least important. If something doesn't need to be done today, you won't see it. I think of Surlesol as the command center for my life. It fits my brain. I contend that, by providing the necessary scaffolding for lasting self-improvement, Surlesol enables people to improve their lives by building good habits, rewiring their brains, and changing their belief systems.

This may seem simple or mundane. But simplicity is often underrated. As Sönke Ahrens says in How to Take Smart Notes, "Intuitively, most people do not expect much from simple ideas. They rather assume that impressive results must have equally impressive, complicated means.” As James Clear notes in the New York Times bestseller Atomic Habits, "Habits are the compound interest of self-improvement." When it comes to personal change, big things have small beginnings. Surlesol is not only a starting point for self-improvemnt, it is the foundation upon which you can grow.

In today's complex world, things so frequently fall through the cracks. We forget what we told ourselves we want or need to do. While achieving positive and lasting change in our lives isn't meant to be simple or quick, but it doesn’t need to be so hard either. For example, an over-reliance on environmental cues, which may be impermanent, can result in setbacks when life throws you a curve ball. When your circumstances change—when you travel, or when your routine is otherwise disrupted—Surlesol continues to be there to supply you with the information you need to stay the course. To find your center quickly. In my experience using Surlesol, I am reminded of what I wanted to remember, and personal growth becomes less difficult, almost automatic. By offering clear reminders and tracking my past performance, I've found Surlesol holds me accountable. Most significantly though, Surlesol provides the foundation for real, transformative personal growth and self-improvement. Not only does Surlesol remind me to do what I said I wanted to do, it also enables me to think about what I want to think about. Ultimately, Surlesol empowers me to become the person that I want to become.

The Origins of Surlesol

It is easier to act yourself into a new way of thinking, than it is to think yourself into a new way of acting.

~ Millard Fuller

I am a big believer that many of the best products are built when the problem being solved is one that the creator(s) faced. The reason I built Surlesol is because I was trying to improve my life and I was having a lot of difficulty finding the consistency that I needed. Also, I was rather unhappy. I felt like I was always stopping and starting, and a great deal of frustration with this process began to set in. At some point, I decided that I needed to begin tracking my habits in order to improve them. Early on, two of the most important influences on my idea to track my habits were "don't break the chain" and "If you can't measure it, you can't improve it." So I first identified a few habits I felt were vital to my success. In the winter of 2017, in addition to tracking these habits, I also began tracking my self-assessed happiness levels:

I immediately found tracking helpful, but I also quickly concluded that doing this by hand was unmanageable. I initially tried a few of the habit-tracking apps that were on the market, but many lacked features that I felt were necessary or just fell short of my expectations. I needed a system that was more than just a list of things that I saw every day. I needed something that, once I added an item, guaranteed that I'd expend zero effort remembering when to do it. The item would just come back into view when I needed it. Since nothing like this existed on the market, I created Surlesol. Launching Surlesol has been a long process in the making. Life has been busy. In 2016 I knew nothing about web development, my son was born in the summer of 2016, and since then I have had four different jobs, moving from London, NYC, Chicago, and soon London again. The past few years have been a wild ride, but, since launching it privately in late 2018, I have had Surlesol to keep me grounded. If you are not yet sold on the benefits of habit tracking, please check out this blog post from a more esteemed and articulate author than myself: https://jamesclear.com/habit-tracker.

Why I Call it Surlesol

Keep your head in the clouds and your feet on the ground.

~ Unknown

The name Surlesol (pronounced sur-le-sol) comes from the French translation of the saying, "with your head in the clouds and your feet on the ground." In French, "sur le sol" literally means "on the ground." The aim with Surlesol is to keep you grounded so you can focus on what's truly important to you. I believe we should dream big dreams and live our best lives without getting bogged down in day-to-day mundanities. This may seem paradoxical, but I believe building good habits allows us to be more spontaneous and to find more time for the things we love. It is my belief that, by building good habits and improving ourselves, we are able lead to more interesting and fulfilling lives. However, to have our head in the clouds we must keep our feet on the ground. C'est la vie.

How to Use Surlesol

The ability to show up everyday, stick to the schedule, and do the work — especially when you don't feel like it — is so valuable that it is literally all you need to become better 99% of the time.

~ James Clear

To get started using Surlesol:

  1. Identify things you want to do more (or less) of.
  2. Sign up for a new account at surlesol.com.
  3. Add the new items to your Surlesol via the “Add New” button.
  4. If you complete the item, mark it as Done.
  5. If you cannot complete the item, mark it as Won't Do, and consider noting why.
  6. If you intend to do it today, mark it In Progress or Will Do.
  7. Check your Surlesol every day.

That's it!

Surlesol in Action

Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate. ~ Carl Jung

When you log into Surlesol, the back-end server sorts all your items in a very specific way. The result is what I call The Surlesol Queue. Before I get into how the items are sorted, I need to explain how to add them in your Surlesol.

Adding a New Item

The most important fields to consider when adding a new item include:

  1. Title.
  2. Days Undone Until Problematic (DUUP).
  3. It the item critical to your success?
  4. Is it a Keystone Habit? Meaning, does it lead to other good habits?
  5. Which wheel of life category does it belong in?

So, let's add five sample items with the following settings:

  1. Meditate one minute each day: 0, False, True, Mornings.
  2. Check Calendar Every Day: 0, False, False, Mornings.
  3. Exercise Every Day (Breathless and Sweaty): 0, True, True, Health.
  4. Read for 5-10 minutes: 0, False, False, Evenings.
  5. Pack Your Gym Clothes for Tomorrow:0, False, True, Evenings.
The Surlesol Algorithm

TheSurlesolAlgorithmScreenshot

The best way to gain an intuition for how the algorithm works is with the examples we created, The List View, and some graphs showing the evolution of The Surlesol Queue. A video demonstrating The Surlesol Algorithm is available on YouTube.

To get the most from Surlesol, it is important to understand how the algorithm works and why you're seeing what you're seeing. The Surlesol Algorithm isn't a black box; in fact, it's just the opposite. My goal is to make you comfortable creating and editing items so that they appear how you want them to. The Surlesol Algorithm gives you full control of your view, but it does take some getting used to.

Items in Surlesol are displayed in order of importance from most important to least important. Right now, everything in Surlesol is shown based on the order of The Surlesol Algorithm (custom sorting options may be a thing in the future). For those interested, here is a snippet of the actual code:

recurring_items = get_recurring_items_for_today(
    wheel_of_life_area,
  ).order_by(
    'current_num_skips',
    '-is_mission_critical',
    '-is_keystone_habit',
    '-days_overdue',
  ).filter(days_overdue__gte=0)

Items are sorted by three key fields and the "current number of skips." The three key fields are: (A) whether an item is Mission Critical (MC), (B) whether that item is a Keystone habit (KS), and (C) the relative overdueness of the item. Items that have been "skipped" are those that we have made a decision on and get moved to the back of the queue. This happens when an item has been marked as "In Progress" or "Will Do." Items moved to the back of our queue will need to be addressed later, or closed out. The goal in Surlesol is to make decisions on, and to complete, the various items in our queue. If we cannot do something on a given day, simply mark it as "Won't Do" and make a note for that item that you can see in your journal next time, if it makes sense to do so.

What's the Deal With the Colors?

As you work through Surlesol, you make decisions on items. Mark something as Done, and the item turns green and is then effectively removed from your queue. Because it is done for today! Alternatively, if you know you cannot do something for whatever reason, mark it as Won't. It will turn grey and be removed from today's queue. These items will remain in your list view, but not in your Focused View as no more decisions are needed on these items. Another choice is to mark something as Doing (yellow) or Want (blue). The idea here is that Doing is whatever we're doing right now. Of course, you don't want to have too many things in progress at any one time. Indicating you Want to do something means you're saying you want to do this at some point today. Lastly, items in red are "Undecided." The idea here is that it is better to make a decision on an item, even if we can't do it, rather than just not acknowledge it.

The Focused View

Numerous studies have shown that humans are literally incapable of multitasking (we actually switch back and forth really fast). The Focused View is designed to help us focus on the task at hand. The Focused View is designed to allow us to think about, and complete, one thing at a time. In addition, The Focused View in Surlesol is designed to show you the "most optimal" things first, as determined by you. Once you have a good handle on how The Surlesol Algorithm works, and have a decent intuition for the order that you'll see things, you are ready to add more items to your Surlesol and get the most The Focused View.

As you use The Focused View, you are shown some calendar data from the past to help inform you on whether or not an item needs to be prioritized. For example, if our exercise item, "Exercise Every Day (Breathless and Sweaty)", is 2 days overdue vs. 10 days overdue, that is a big difference if we said we wanted to exercise every day. Visually, seeing the past 10 days marked "Won't Do" can be a good kick in the ass to figure out how to make something happen.

The List View

The List View displays our items as they are sorted by The Surlesol Algorithm, as aformentioned. Sometimes, when we are planning what we want to do, it may make more sense to use the List View rather than The Focused View and scan all of our items at once.

How Do I Know That Surlesol Has Helped Me?

"We humans tend to fixate on what we can see with our eyes. When we look at the changes and transformations in other people's lives we see the good luck... we see the book or the project that brings the money and the attention. In other words, we see the visible signs of opportunity and success. What really allows for such dramatic changes are the things that occur on the inside of a person and are completely invisible."

~Greene, Robert (via The Key to Transforming Yourself)

Here I am, some stranger on the interwebs, trying to convince you, dear reader, that Surlesol “Provides the mental scaffolding necessary for self-improvement”; or “is a foundation upon which you can build better habits over time.” But you might be asking, does Surlesol actually do what I say it does? Does it help? It's certainly a valid question. Demonstrating any type of personal growth to another person is difficult, if not impossible, as noted in the Robert Greene quote above, without actual visual evidence. So, allow me to share some of my own data.

I started Surlesol in late 2018, when I launched Surlesol.com strictly for my personal use. At the time, I wasn't thinking about earning revenue from this venture. I simply wanted the tool I built to be easily available on any device. Something I continued to do after moving on from pen and paper was track my happiness each day. This exercise has been valuable because it forces me to think about how I'm feeling, put a number on it, and critically, consider if there is anything I can do to improve my current situation. For our purposes here, my happiness/serenity score will also serve as a proxy for my success in improving my life (albeit a heavily biased one). The graph below shows my happiness/serenity levels as measured on a self-reported scale of 1-100 over a period of 3+ years, from 29 October 2018 to 25 January 2022:

The point of this chart is not that Surlesol, by itself, makes me happier or more serene. Rather, the point is that, despite a whole lot of turmoil in my life — and in the world — over the past 3-4 years, I managed to stay on top of the things that I said were important to me and keep my happiness relatively steady. For much of 2019, things weren't great. In addition to a lot of life stuff going on, the firm I worked at in NYC went under. The 30-day moving average of my happiness bottomed out at around 15/100 during June 2019, but since then, I have been steadily climbing and doing the things I need to do. I landed a new job in Chicago in July 2019, my circumstances improved, I was able to re-focus on my habits/routines. My happiness/serenity started to climb steadily. And then? Yeah, 2020 and the pandemic. At the start of the pandemic my happiness takes a sharp dive as the world was thrown into chaos. It takes a steady climb until the spring of 2021 at which point I parted ways with my employer and began initiating a divorce with my wife. Further, I tore my Achilles in May 2021 which but a damper on my plans to exercise. And now, as I prepare to go back to London, I feel on top of things again. My Achilles is nearly fully healed, I am exercising regularly, and I am excited to see my son again. Things are looking up. Of course it hasn't been easy, but I believe it's been made easier in part by my use of Surlesol. While I'd love to elaborate beyond basically saying "correlation equals causation," it's a bit outside the scope of this post.

Is Surlesol Right for You?

Happiness, in fact, is a condition that must be prepared for, cultivated, and defended privately by each person... People who learn to control inner experience will be able to determine the quality of their lives, which is as close as any of us can come to being happy.

~ Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly

For a significant percentage of the population, I expect this approach to self-improvement to "just click." I am sure those individuals are already on board and need no further convincing. However, I understand that many people will be skeptical. I know there are plenty of other productivity systems and they may fit your needs just fine. Perhaps the most damning criticism of Surlesol I have heard was when someone close to me said that, rather than use Surlesol, they would just "live their life." But what is hard to explain in a face-to-face conversation is that, Surlesol helps me to live my life more fully. In my case, happiness or serenity didn't come naturally or easily. I knew what I needed to do, but I had trouble doing it. There is an achient Chinese proverb that says, "To know and not to do, is in fact, not to know." This was exactly the case for me. I knew exactly what I needed to do, but in the critical moments I would not do the thing I needed to do. And this is the sort of person I'm hoping to reach: Those individuals that want to change but aren't sure how.

In the famous Marshmallow experiment at Stanford, the children were differentiated into two groups: those with self-control and those without it (pardon the gross oversimplification). I believe Surlesol can be most helpful to those in the latter group. I did not grow up with the best habits, and I'll never be perfect, but I'm always working on adopting better habits, because, as Henri Bergson says, "To exist is to change, to change is to mature, to mature is to go on creating oneself endlessly." Surlesol has enabled me reinforce my good habits to the point that my identity and belief system have changed for the better. If you know what you need to do, but have trouble doing it, or if you wish you could have serenity now, I encourage you to give Surlesol a try.

Potential Flaws and Feedback

The best is the enemy of the good.

~ Volitare

Feedback on Surlesol—questions, comments, complaints—is welcome and appreciated! Email me at steven @ surlesol.com (Please include [feedback] in the subject header). I understand that there's much room for improvement with Surlesol, both technically and as a product. I hope you'll keep in mind that, up till now, the development of this app has been strictly a one-person show. I'm grateful for the feedback I've already received, and I'd appreciate even more honest, constructive criticisms.

Here's some feedback I've received so far, with some color:

  1. No Mobile App: No doubt, this is by far the biggest flaw with Surlesol now. I know that mobile-first makes a ton of sense, but when I considered the trade-off between (A) no desktop experience and (B) a sub-optimal mobile experience, I went with the latter. By developing the app in Django I can move quickly and release changes to all browsers at once. As the sole developer/SRE for Surlesol, and someone with no previous mobile development experience, this is the approach I had to take to get something out there.
  2. No Offline Support: Currently the app doesn't work offline. I made this choice after considering whether to implement database syncing and/or operational transformations. I decided to keep it simple for this first iteration to ensure that when you have a stable internet connection to Surlesol, you get an immediate response to every request.
  3. Manually Intensive: Tracking items in Surlesol is completely manual at present. Yes, this is cumbersome. However, the ability to manage and think about so many items in such a short period of time is valuable and worth the trouble in my opinion. Eventually I'd love to automate the completion of events based on "triggers." I would also like to automate the detection of item completions. For example, I have "check my calendar" in my own Surlesol for the morning. It would be great to have an API to mark this item as done if I visit my calendar.
  4. No Push Notifications: With no mobile app or progressive web app right now, there are no push notifications. Personally, I'm not a fan of push notifications, though I understand the some users really like them. So along with the mobile app, push notifications will be a high priority.

Objectives of This Post

Beyond introducing Surlesol to the world, I have several goals for this blog post, including:

  1. Solicit feedback on the state of the app and the direction of the company.
  2. Find new users interested in this approach to self-improvement.
  3. Connect and network with like-minded individuals.
  4. Attract talented individuals seeking part-time work, internships, and perhaps full-time gigs if we get there.
  5. Maybe find a potential co-owner or two.

Surlesol the Company

What do we live for, if not to make life less difficult for each other?

~ George Eliot

The goal of Surlesol as a company is to improve the lives of our users first and foremost. We are going to prioritize the well-being of our users. We'll respect their privacy and respect them as individuals. Also, I should note that we are bootstrapping and thus not seeking funding. We do not plan on growth at all costs, and there are no plans to IPO or sell. There is nothing wrong with IPO-ing or selling per se, but I am of the opinion that for Surlesol to be a different kind of company we need to remain independent. This will enable us to continue put the individuals that use Surlesol first.

This has been a side-project of mine for several years and while it is not full-time, I plan to continue devoting time to the project. I am especially interested if there is anyone out there that is interested in joining Surlesol in a part-time capacity (we need an experienced mobile developer), with the understanding that equity in the company is the primary (but not only) form of compensation right now. So long as you disclose the work to your current employer, part-timers with another full-time job are welcome. Given that we are bootstrapping the equity in the company would be valuable in so far as we make money and can pay ourselves (no plans to IPO any time soon, if ever). This has been a side project of mine for several years and while it is not full-time, I devote as much time as I can on this. If you enjoy the app and are intrigued by the company and its potential, I hope you'll sign up for the app. I'd also appreciate any input.

My preference is to be supported by paying customers rather than rely on advertising. My goal is to have 1,000 paying subscribers by August 2022. But even if we don't reach that number by then, I will keep running Surlesol as it's that important for me. I may eventually disable sign-up if the ratio of free-to-paid users gets too high, but I will still keep it going.

Closing

I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable ability of man to elevate his life by conscious endeavor.

~ Henry David Thoreau

Publishing this blog post and making the app available for public use is a bit daunting, but I am finally shipping this damn thing. It's been over five years in the making and especially now that Stripe webhooks are finally working in production, I have no more excuses. If you have any thoughts on the above, please feel free to reach out at steven @ surlesol.com. Thank you for reading.

TL;DR:

This blog post is about what Surlesol (surlesol.com) is, why I work on it, and where I hope to take the company in the future.