What I Busted My Butt Building: The MyLotus Tracker
People keep asking me what this “mylotus” thing is and why I even bother talking about it. Well, let me lay it out straight for you new folks. Forget all the fancy tech jargon you read on LinkedIn. Mylotus is just a tracking tool I built because I got sick of things falling through the cracks. That’s the simple explanation. It doesn’t do your taxes. It doesn’t optimize your cloud spending. It just holds your hand and screams at you when you’re about to miss a deadline. It’s a digital nagging buddy, nothing more.
I started building this thing about six years ago. I was working at a small, fast-paced startup—you know the type. Everyone wore twenty hats, and the only “process” we had was controlled chaos. Our workflow was a total mess, a train wreck every single day. We had tasks coming in through customer service tickets, direct DMs on Slack, sticky notes left on keyboards, and half-baked notes in a shared Google Doc that nobody ever actually updated. Projects just vanished. I’d finish something and then realize a week later that the person who needed it never actually got the files because I just thought I’d sent the email.
The bosses tried to fix it. They kept trying to shove expensive, complicated project management systems down our throats—you know, the ones that cost a fortune and need a six-hour training session just to figure out how to log in. We’d use them for three weeks, realize they were too much effort, and everyone would slip right back into their old ways of just yelling updates across the office. I watched the company burn money on these high-tech systems that did nothing but collect dust and make us more frustrated. We were a small team; we needed something stupidly simple, something that required zero effort to maintain. But that didn’t exist, so I had to make it.
Why I Smashed the Keyboard and Got Started
So, what was the turning point? Why did I, a guy whose coding skills were strictly “copy-paste from Stack Overflow,” decide to become a software developer for a week? It all goes back to a client named “Atlas Solutions.” This was a huge project, a massive deliverable that was supposed to be our meal ticket for the quarter. I had finished my part of the integration testing and, in my head, I marked it as done. I distinctly remember telling the project lead, Jeff, that the final code packet was ready to go to the client that evening.
I left work early, feeling good. I was going to a concert. Two days later, a Monday morning, I walk into a war zone. Jeff is bright red, shouting into the phone. The client, Atlas Solutions, had been waiting since Friday evening. The final code packet? It was sitting on Jeff’s desktop, right where I’d put it, but he had a thousand other things going on and hadn’t gotten around to the final send-off email. Because I hadn’t formally documented that step in the team’s messy spreadsheet, he just lost track of the last fifteen minutes of the process. The client ripped us a new one. We paid a massive late penalty and barely saved the relationship.
The bosses, of course, needed a scapegoat. They slapped the failure on me, claiming my “verbal update wasn’t official company procedure.” They docked my pay for that month, saying I needed to “learn accountability.” That set me off. I packed my monitor, my mechanical keyboard, and walked straight out of that place, no two weeks’ notice, nothing. I sat at home, seething, thinking: Never again will my work be lost in someone else’s chaos. That very night, fueled by three pots of coffee and pure spite, I opened up my old programming environment and just started building. That’s how mylotus was born. It wasn’t about building a product; it was about building a personal fortress against incompetence.
The Simple Steps I Took to Make it Work
The goal was simplicity. If it took more than ten seconds to update, it failed. I built mylotus with just three core actions. New users need to understand this is how you force yourself to stay organized. I forced myself to follow this routine, and it saved my butt when I went freelance.
- First, You Grab and Log It: The minute a task comes in—email, text, whatever—I immediately opened mylotus and punched in a new entry. I didn’t wait. I wrote the absolute minimum: client name, the task title (e.g., “Fix Bug on Checkout Page”), and the exact deadline time. That’s it. No long descriptions, no attachments. Just the meat.
- Second, You Set the Status Straight: I refused to have ten different status options. That’s where things get messy. Mylotus only has four states, and you must choose one.
- Waiting on Others: I am stuck waiting for input from someone else.
- Working On It: I’m actively doing the work right now.
- Needs Review: I’ve finished the work, but it needs someone else’s sign-off.
- Donezo: It’s closed, dead, gone.
I made myself change the status the second I moved from one state to another. A constant, simple update.
- Third, You Let the Alarm Bell Ring: I coded the most important, simplest visual cue. If the task’s deadline is within four hours, the entire line of text turns bright, flashing red. Not a subtle orange or a soft yellow—a retina-burning, shame-inducing red. I forced my eyes to go straight to the red lines every time I opened the dashboard. I created a system that actively punishes you for ignoring it.
When I started using mylotus for all my freelance work, I saw the difference immediately. I stopped sending those frantic late-night emails apologizing for missing something. I kept my clients happy. I looked professional. I realized that all those fancy, expensive tools failed because they asked people to change their behavior too much. Mylotus is simple. It just forces you to be honest with yourself about what is actually due next. I still use it today, and I still tell people: forget the complicated stuff. If you’re a new user, mylotus is what you use to stop being a nervous wreck and just start getting your work done without dropping the ball. That’s the whole point. It just works.
