Too much to hold in your head at once.
The car tax coming due. My brother's present. The appointment I still had to book. The gym, which always slips unless I pin it down. That film someone recommended, whose title I could no longer remember.
In among all that was the company I had founded. The server alert at one in the morning, the review left half done, the interview for the new backend engineer, the idea for an algorithm that came to me in the car and was gone by the evening.
And the calendars: one per job, plus my own, none of them talking to each other. Deadlines arrived from different people and different projects, part by email, part in conversation, part in a message. My thoughts and ideas were everywhere except in the same place.
Then my mother's birthday, the shopping, friends who say let's catch up and two months go by. Taken one at a time, none of this is hard. What is hard is holding it all at once, and going from an infrastructure problem to the washing machine in the space of ten minutes.
I tried notes on my phone, reminders, sheets of paper on the desk. Everything ended up somewhere different, and none of those places talked to the others. In the end the place was me, and by evening my head was buzzing.
I did not need another place to write things down. I needed someone to tell them to.
Bruno started on a Sunday, as an experiment. I would send it a message and it worked out what the message was about and where it belonged. After three days I was sending it everything.
The real leap was connecting the calendar. From then on it stopped being a memory and started reasoning about the time I actually have: if I ask whether something fits, it looks at the week and tells me no when the answer is no.
I have more going on now than I did then: new ideas, projects starting up, companies to build, and big changes in my personal life. This is exactly the moment Bruno became indispensable. Without it, half of these things would already have fallen by the wayside.
Whenever something is missing I add it the same evening. From today I will also add what is missing for you.