The Potato Just Needs You There (kinda)

I pick up my phone approximately seven hundred times a day and I can't tell you why.

Not for anything specific. Not because someone texted. Not because I need to check the time or the weather or whether that package has shipped. I pick it up because my hand knows where it is, my thumb knows what to tap, and before my brain catches up, I'm three apps deep into a dopamine treasure hunt that leaves me feeling slightly sick.

It's not a nice feeling. It makes me anxious. It wastes a lot of time.

And the worst part is: I know all of this while it's happening. I'm not confused about what's going on. I'm just completely unable to stop myself in the moment.

So I did what you do when you can't solve a problem: I tried to design around it.

The Missing Piece

I tried a lot of focus apps. They worked, technically. Lock the screen, start a timer, block the distractions. The phone would be unusable for the duration I set.

But something felt off. After a few days, I'd find myself resenting my own phone. The apps were effective, but they made focusing feel like a battle I had to win against myself.

There's something Anthony de Mello said about this. When you renounce something - when you fight it or restrict it - you become tied to it. The restriction itself gives it power.

That's what these apps were doing. By making my phone the enemy - something to restrict and fight against - they were actually making it more central to my life, not less. Every time I wanted to check it and couldn't, I was thinking about it. The restriction became its own form of obsession.

The problem wasn't the apps themselves. The problem was that they were trying to stop a behavior without replacing it with anything.

I'd reach for my phone out of anxiety or boredom, not actually looking for content but for something to do. A small, contained action that feels productive but requires zero commitment. The phone provides that instantly: tap an icon, see a thing, feel like you did something, repeat.

Most focus tools try to remove the mindless tapping. But they don't give you anything to replace the need that made you reach for the phone in the first place.

So I started thinking: what if there was something on your phone that made you want to put it down?

The potato gives you both. Something quick to check when you get the urge - just open the app, see what they're up to, close it again. And something meaningful to commit to - a real focus session where you work together.

What if there was someone who genuinely needed you to put the phone down, not to punish you, but because they couldn't do their work without your focused attention?

Meet the Potato

I wanted to build something that felt less like a productivity tool and more like a friend.

Not in the LinkedIn "my AI assistant is my friend!" way. Not a character that pretends to care while showing you ads. I mean someone who has their own life, their own projects, and who sometimes needs your help to get things done.

The potato showed up pretty early in the design process, though I couldn't tell you exactly why it's a potato. It just... felt right. Potatoes are unassuming. They're a little odd. They're not trying to be cute in the way that a puppy is cute. A potato has dignity.

And this potato is a craftsman. They found a perfect clearing in the forest and they want to build a home there. They have skills and ambition and a clear vision for what they want to create. The only thing they're missing is something they genuinely cannot do alone: they need a human to provide focused attention while they work.

Not motivation. Not supervision. Not accountability. Just... focused time to work.

This is the relationship I wanted to design for: the potato doesn't need you to be perfect. They just need you to put the phone down while they build.

The Rule That Made Everything Harder

The constraint I gave myself was simple: everything had to be hand-drawn.

I'm a product designer by profession, but I've always made art for the joy of it. Drawing, painting, making things with my hands. That's where I feel most myself. For years, my day job and my art lived in separate worlds. This was finally a project where I could pour everything into one place.

Every sprite, every animation, every element in the world had to come from my own hand. Not because I had to, but because I wanted to. This wasn't a constraint I resented; it was the whole point.

It would have been faster to use templates. It would have been easier to hire someone. But I think the roughness matters. When you see the potato move or watch a new object appear in the clearing, you can tell a person made it. It has the texture of something that took time and care.

The second constraint was harder to articulate but just as important: the app had to feel wholesome.

Not wholesome in the corporate wellness sense. Not wholesome like a motivational poster. Wholesome in the sense that when you use it, you should feel like you're spending time with someone who genuinely wants good things for you and doesn't have an agenda beyond that.

This meant stripping away everything that didn't serve that feeling. No menus full of options. No stats dashboards. No streaks or leaderboards or any of the gamification that turns an app into a performance review.

Just you, the potato, and the clearing.

What the Potato Does While You're Gone

When you open the app and you're not in a focus session, the potato is just... living their life.

They might be wandering around the clearing. Stretching by the water. Reading in the chair you built together. At night, they sleep, curled up in the bed. They're not waiting for you in the way an app waits for input. They're just there, doing their thing.

The world doesn't stay static either. It grows with you - nature slowly reclaiming edges, well-worn paths appearing where the potato travels most. Things get used. They get a bit messy. Sometimes they need tidying. The clearing becomes more lived-in over time.

The potato has their own rhythm, their own life that continues whether you're there or not. But they're always ready to focus when you are. Tap the button at 2 AM and they'll wake up, not annoyed or groggy, just present.

When you start a focus session, the camera zooms in. The potato comes over and suggests two tasks. You pick one, set your time (5 to 120 minutes), and the timer starts. Your phone locks.

The potato works in real-time on what you chose together. 1:1 real-time - every minute you focus is a minute the potato works. No points, no energy systems. Just direct time spent together.

The Button I Almost Didn't Include

There's a button during focus sessions called "Give me a minute."

If you tap it, the phone unlocks temporarily. The potato stops working and takes a break. No punishment. No streak broken. No disappointed face. Just a pause. Life happens. Maybe you need to check a message or take a call or deal with something unexpected.

When you're ready, you come back, and the work continues from where you left off.

I almost didn't include this button because it felt like a compromise. If the whole point is to help people put their phone down, why give them an easy out?

Then I realized: the button isn't an out. It's a recognition.

You don't have to be unreachable to be focused. The "Give me a minute" button just acknowledges that you're a person with a life, not a productivity machine. And crucially, it removes the all-or-nothing pressure that makes people give up entirely.

Knowing you can pause makes it easier to start. And once you start regularly, you stop needing the pauses as much.

The potato doesn't judge the pause. They just wait. That's what a good companion does.

What This Isn't

Once you start thinking about motivation and habits, there's a very obvious path that every app seems to take: streaks, metrics, achievements, social features, competition.

I drew some hard lines early.

The potato cannot die.

If you ignore the app for a week, the potato doesn't get sad or sick or punish you. They're just there when you come back, ready to work. Your life is allowed to exist.

No streaks.

Streaks turn every absence into a failure. I wanted coming back after a break to feel like reuniting with a friend, not admitting defeat.

No overwhelming choices.

The potato suggests two tasks. Pick one or don't, but you're never staring at a list wondering what you're "supposed" to do.

No metrics that judge you.

You can see what you've built. But there's no graph of your focus capacity, no comparison to other users, no ranking. The app doesn't measure you. It just shows you what you made together.

This is for finally having something on your phone you can enjoy while putting your phone away.

The phone isn't the enemy. It's just that right now, every app on it wants something from you - your attention, your data, your money, your engagement.

The potato just wants to build a home.

The Pack System, or: What Happens When You Finish

After about two to three weeks of regular focus sessions, you'll complete the Home Pack. The clearing will have transformed - there's a cozy bed, a well-worn workbench, a reading nook with a chair and books, a little kitchen area, and much more. Each piece built together, each one a small victory.

The bridge is special. It's the last main task, and building it reveals something new: a path leading out of the clearing to somewhere else.

At this point, the potato walks over to the bridge, looks at the path, and essentially says: "We could explore what's beyond here... or we could just stay in the clearing."

If you want to keep going, you can purchase the next pack - a new place waiting beyond the bridge, with its own secrets to discover and projects to build together. If you don't, that's completely fine. The clearing is still there. You can keep doing maintenance tasks (tidying up areas as they naturally get messy over time) or recreational tasks (meditation, reading, napping, cloud watching) as much as you want. And who knows - maybe there will even be new things to build or repair as the home settles into its life.

The app doesn't nag you to buy the next pack. It doesn't lock features or make the clearing feel incomplete. The home is finished. What you built together is yours. The option to continue is there if you want it, but it's not a pressure.

This was another hard line: you can stop whenever you want and what you made doesn't disappear.

What I'm Learning in Real Time

I'm writing this before the app launches because I want to be honest about what I don't know yet.

Will people connect with a potato the way I hope? I'm not sure. Maybe the hand-drawn aesthetic will feel as warm to others as it does to me. Maybe removing streaks was naive.

What I do know is this: I built the app I needed. The one that doesn't make me feel bad about being human. The one where putting your phone down doesn't feel like punishment. It feels like helping a friend.

And if that works for even a handful of other people who are tired of fighting with their devices, then I think the potato will have done its job.

The Potato Just Needs You There (kinda)

The potato doesn't need you to be productive. They need you to commit. You choose a task, set the timer, put the phone down. That's it.

Apps want metrics and engagement and daily active users. The potato just wants to finish the table.

I don't know if this will be popular or profitable or even make sense to most people.

But I know this: I'm tired of feeling anxious when I pick up my phone. I'm tired of apps that treat me like a problem to be solved.

So I drew a potato, gave them a forest clearing, and asked them to make something special together with me.

And it turns out, that was enough.