I built a multi-timer app because AI gave me too much free time and too many tasks at once — shipped in 6 days
AI changed how I work — but not in the way I expected.
On paper, AI tools should have made my life easier. Delegate the routine stuff, focus on the important work. But what actually happened was that AI made routine tasks so cheap to generate that my task list exploded. Write a blog post. Submit to a directory. Draft a newsletter. Generate landing page copy. Optimize ASO keywords. Each one takes "just 5 minutes" — but suddenly I had 40 of them.
I'm a solo indie developer. I don't have enough revenue to live on yet, so I'm hustling across every channel I can find. And here's what happened: I was doing a lot every day — really, a lot — but at the end of the day, it felt like I'd accomplished nothing. The tasks kept regenerating. The finish line kept moving. The work started to feel empty. That was the hardest part. Not burnout from too much work, but emptiness from work without a sense of progress.
I tried delegating more to AI. That gave me more free time — which sounds great, except I had no idea what to do with it. Without structure, the unstructured time just turned into anxiety. I needed something in between. Not a rigid schedule (those never lasted more than 3 days for me), but not total chaos either.
That's why I built KASANE.
What it does
KASANE is a freemium iOS app that runs multiple habit timers simultaneously. Instead of tracking daily streaks, it accumulates the time you've invested in each activity — and lets you see the total at a glance.
The core idea: start several timers in parallel, let them run at their own pace, and feel the accumulation without the pressure of "did I do it perfectly today?"
- Multiple timers at once. Start a focus session, a reading timer, and a stretching timer — all running together. No app-switching.
- No streaks. Missing a day doesn't erase anything. The time you spent is still there.
- Daily Card. Each day's progress compiles into a shareable image — not for competition, just for quiet self-reflection.
- No accounts, no ads. Everything stays on-device with SwiftData. No backend.
I'll be honest: if you're a perfectionist who thrives on rigid schedules and color-coded calendars, this app is not for you. But if you're like me — someone who can't stick to a strict routine but still wants to build something over time — KASANE might fit.
How I built it
SwiftUI for all UI, SwiftData for local persistence, local notifications for reminders. The entire app was built and submitted to the App Store in 6 days using Composer 2.5 as my primary coding tool.
What Composer 2.5 handled well: scaffolding, boilerplate, iterative UI tweaks. Where it struggled: nuanced state management for overlapping timers and notification scheduling edge cases.
Where it's at
- Live on the App Store (free with optional subscription/lifetime purchase)
- Product Hunt launched
- Still early — I'm sharing real numbers as they come in
What I'm struggling with
The biggest challenge right now is discovery. "Habit timer" isn't a category people search for — they search for "habit tracker" or "timer app" and KASANE sits between both. I'm experimenting with positioning but haven't found the angle that clicks yet.
Also — and this is the deeper issue — I'm still figuring out the right relationship between AI-assisted productivity and my own sense of accomplishment. AI made my tasks cheaper but not lighter. If anyone here has navigated that "doing more but feeling less" phase, I'd genuinely like to hear how you dealt with it.
The "doing more but feeling less" thing really resonates — AI removes the friction of starting a task but not the cost of switching between forty half-finished ones, so you stay busy without ever settling into anything. What helped me was capping how many AI-generated tasks I let onto the list per day, basically treating AI output as a suggestion queue instead of a to-do list. On positioning: your Daily Card is actually the opposite of what every other habit tracker does — no streak pressure, just quiet accumulation. That contrast might land better in the App Store description than competing for "timer app" or "habit tracker" keywords directly.
This is a real but under-discussed shift: AI doesn’t just reduce workload—it fragments it into more micro-tasks, which can erase the feeling of completion even when output increases. The idea of tracking accumulation instead of streaks is interesting because it tries to restore “sense of progress” rather than enforce discipline.