Our Story
Built by a real person,
for a real life.
I remember a night in college where my dad showed up unexpectedly and took me out to dinner. We had a great evening, and over the meal he shared some lifelong advice: "Be a renaissance man," he said.
So I took up that charge and ran with it.
I'm a certified welding inspector in aerospace, formerly a video game producer and logistics specialist. I'm a shepherd of sheep, a hobby pianist, a sci-fi and Warhammer 40K fan, a watch enthusiast and aspiring watchmaker, a husband to the love of my life, and a father of two small children who make every day both incredible and exhausting.
It's not without its burdens. Lack of sleep from too many projects. "Brain burn" from thinking too hard, too fast, all day long - a mixture of anxiety and creative ideas firing at light speed. My grandfather had a brutally long fight with Alzheimer's, and I'm well aware of the toll that cortisol, burnout, and broken sleep patterns take on long-term health. I'm effectively a mad scientist without the collegiate stipend.
I spent around two years trying to find a workable system for my insatiable cravings for knowledge, projects, and learning. I found incredible products from incredible teams: mind-mapping for my knowledge base, GTD purity for my daily activities, project tracking for my large endeavors. Three discrete trackers for three domains: knowledge, planning, execution. A nightmare of copy-paste and alt-tab.
Despite how good each tool was on its own, none of them could fully apprehend my life. They only grabbed onto aspects of it and forced me to micro-manage my existence around their parameters.
And then I had a eureka moment.
It wasn't the overwhelm of projects or any one thing in particular that inevitably crashed my system. It was effort itself - the ebb and flow of my own energy into self-directed work, and how it commanded my life's processes. So I looked for an app to track it. But nothing exists. Effort was a known force, an unquantifiable "dark matter" that is inevitably tied to productivity, but poorly captured by every tool on the market.
Well, I do love a challenge. And I do love to learn, and create. So I built my own system to measure effort. I added a recursive feedback loop so I could learn from myself - wins, mistakes, biological cycles, everything that made effort seem unquantifiable was uncovered and captured, or irrelevant.
Two years of using polished, beautiful apps to run my life from a project-and-checklist viewpoint never helped me conquer my own frustrations and burnout. Two months of obsessive building proved the concept — an effort management engine that finally worked, through weeks of slow but clear iterative progress.
That engine became EMRALD.
Measure your own effort. Get on the road to personal effort mastery. Regain your margins.
All it takes is starting a project timer, ten seconds of honest feedback when you stop, and four weeks of sticking to it.
