What Annoyed You Today?

You open the fridge, look at what's in there and spend the next 10-15 minutes working out what to cook. More nights than you'd probably admit.

I've (ok, my wife, not me) been doing this for about 10 years. The thing that would solve it has been obvious for most of that time and I have not once built it.

That's the signal, I think. The specific, boring, repeated friction that lives in your actual day. Not somewhere exciting or novel. Just...sitting there, getting worked around.

Most people looking for an idea start with "what could I build?" This question is ambitious and has a tendency to paralyse.

A lot of half-finished Figma files and not many actual products.

"What annoyed me today?" is a different question. It already happened. You're the user, you have the context and you already know enough to tell whether something would actually be worth using. Most ideas don't get to know that until much later, if at all.

The shopping list that doesn't write itself. The expense you're not sure you already paid. The meal plan you rebuild from scratch every Sunday because last week's version is buried in a note you opened once and haven't touched since. (I do this with my workouts too, as it happens. Same structure every Monday. Wonder on Friday why nothing's changed. The evidence for this particular habit has been accumulating for years and I have done nothing about it.)

None of these are interesting problems, honestly. That's sort of the point.

Anyway, building has never been cheaper or at least not in any way that mattered practically until recently. A lot of the problems worth solving have been sitting there waiting. The cost of building was the reason nobody did anything about them.

So. What's been annoying you this week?