Gentle Refinement Month 3—A Creative Dashboard

It’s time.

Maybe it is even a little past time. But the time has arrived to begin work on my next refinement. Before I jump into this month's plan, though, I want to briefly look back at last month.

A Nightly Routine

I'll just put this out there: I didn't do great last month.

I carried out parts of my plan, but not all of them. And not anywhere close to what I had hoped. Most importantly, I didn't stick to the plan to not use my phone at all while in bed. I managed it some nights, but still found myself coming up with excuses to doom scroll while in bed.

I am confident the nights I didn't do that my sleep was better. More restful. This is a long-term refinement I need to keep working on. I intend to.

We'll periodically come back to it throughout the year.

Managing Ideas

If you watched my shortcut video or read that article, you know I end up having a lot of ideas. And for many different areas of my life. Since I started Imperfect Practice, I have been trying to find the best way to manage my ideas and projects.

I have tried a variety of different tools, but nothing stuck. OmniFocus, while a powerful task manager, isn't well suited to this. They keep teasing a Kanban view, but it was supposed to be released last year and we are still waiting.

I decided to try Todoist given it does have a Kanban view. Reminders on Apple products does now also. But I felt a bit too much friction, and it wasn't visually engaging. I bounced off both.

I've even been trying to use Trello. Kanban is all Trello does. And while it has more tools to help with the visual aspect, and I continue to use it for my idea capture, it hasn't been exactly what I wanted.

I also wrote about my paper notebook. I am still using it, but I wanted to find something more. I wanted a tool where I could have different tasks for my different creative projects and then see them on a calendar. I wanted to be able to move them around, to have them visually striking. And while I could approximate what I wanted with a combination of different tools, nothing was exactly what I had envisioned.

As far as I could tell, the tool I wanted didn't exist. So I only had one option.

I had to make it.

Vibe Coding for the Rest of Us

I am not a coder. The last time I did anything that could be considered coding was in my CS 160 course in college. We had to use HTML to hand-code a personal website.

I am somewhat technologically inclined, though, and an enthusiast, so I had some ideas of what might work.

After hearing about Claude Code for a number of months, I decided it was time to jump in. I created a project folder, opened Claude Code in that folder, and then told it what I wanted.

It only took a few minutes, and I had a rough prototype. After a number of other back-and-forth iterations, I soon had a working version of what I had envisioned.

It wasn't going to win any design awards, but it worked.

There was only one problem: it ran only on my one machine.

Back and forth some more. I set up a personal GitHub page and account. I sent my code there. I created a Vercel account. I could see my code on GitHub and create a webpage that would be installable as a web app on any device. I set up a Supabase account and page, and used that to sync data.

All it took was the usual Claude Pro subscription I have already been paying for, and about three hours total of back and forth. And now I have the tool I have wanted for months.

My Creative Dashboard.

The Refinement

I plan to dive more into my vibe coding efforts, but it is still pretty new to me. In the last few weeks, I have coded a tier list webpage, my creative dashboard, a Drafts plugin to process my daily stream-of-consciousness writing, and a Mac app to search for and download high resolution album artwork.

But that isn't the refinement.

My goal, this month, is to actually use the dashboard. I didn't build it just to build it (though the experience was very valuable). I built it to use it.

So, throughout the course of the month, I will use this dashboard to plan out my creative content strategy. I have already had Claude Code make numerous small adjustments as I have found either pain points, or adjustments that would make it more pleasant to use.

But the using it is the thing. Planning, thinking, none of it matters in the end. Only the doing. The using.

I will add this to my tools, adjust my workflow as needed, and over the course of March see if this helps, or is just a toy that doesn't add anything.

Still, I am so excited to have the tool I saw in my mind.

Now we see how it works.