Intro to Congruence
My favorite — and most-opened — app is called Congruence. I am the only user.
I’ve mentioned home-cooked software before, and cited this post by Robin Sloan:
When you liberate programming from the requirement to be professional and scalable, it becomes a different activity altogether, just as cooking at home is really nothing like cooking in a commercial kitchen.
Congruence is exactly such a home-cooked meal — a utility app that is steadily wiping out the need for many other apps on my phone. It is perfectly-suited for how I want some of the following use cases to be managed and experienced:
- Scheduling, timeblocking, and reminders
- Daily checklists, routines, and habits
- Capturing notes and quickly interacting with AI
- Meditating & breathwork
- Tracking people to call
- Tracking my mood
- And other utility functions like access management
It consists of an iOS app (on both my main & Freedom phones — more on that later), and a desktop Mac app, with all data synced together, and is broken down into a number of “modules” targeting many of those use cases I just mentioned. You can see them as buttons in the top section of the home screen here:
This post series will briefly explain each of the modules.
Below the module bar is the heart of the app: a timeblocked, templated schedule. Each day has a different schedule, including general timeblocks (“Work”) and reminders / tasks. You can see in that screenshot, for instance, completed Vibe Check and Meditation sessions (both linked to specific modules), as well as habits I still need to complete (750 Words, 1 Commit), and more.
As the day progresses, some of these items need to be checked off and some simply drop into the past. Some send me notifications (“Gym in 15 minutes!”).
You can also see “Weekly Checklist” on there: it’s a Sunday as I’m writing this, which means I do my weekly review / prep habit. Tapping into that item shows a checklist of such items (reviewing priorities, sending updates, etc.). Every day also has its own Evening Checklist in a similar format.
I’m having a blast building this app. It is so much fun to build something so narrowly focused on my own idiosyncrasies, and it turns out to be tremendously useful, too.
Why am I publishing this post about an n=1 app that nobody else can use? Honestly, mainly to catalogue my current thinking here for later review. But also perhaps in the hopes that it might inspire others to build their own personal apps to, well… bring them more into congruence.
Let’s check out the features, starting with Streaks & MEQ.
Want to hear about new essays? Subscribe to my roughly-monthly newsletter recapping my recent writing and things I'm enjoying:
And I'd love to hear from you directly: andy@andybromberg.com