Protocol Deviation
Bounded Self
Daylio
RescueTime
Sarenica
BlissCompass
Bearable App
Magic Flow
Streaks
Bounded Self tracks where your energy goes. You log what you did, rate how much it cost you (1-10), and the app shows you patterns over time.
Most people know they're tired but can't point to why. This gives you a ledger that shows which tasks, which people, which situations are expensive, and whether that's changed lately. A category that normally costs 3 but hit 8 this week means something changed. The app flags it.
Logging takes about 10 seconds: pick a category, slide the energy cost. You can tag entries by person, location, or mood. The dashboard tracks cost shifts over 7 to 30 days.
It's not a mood tracker or a journal. It treats energy like money: something you spend, something worth budgeting.
Premium adds weekly energy budgets per category (same idea as YNAB), custom categories, experiments to test whether a change actually helped, a reflection journal, and reporting.
Free tier: core tracking, 7 days of history, 10 categories. Premium: budgeting, longer history, custom categories, experiments.
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Bounded Self's answer:
Bounded Self gives you the tracking and budgeting tools to know where your energy is being spent and take control of what job you give the energy. It approaches the Freudian concept of cathexis to a place where we can identify what and who is draining us while ensuring we are actively working towards the goals we want to achieve.
Bounded Self's answer:
Bounded Self is for people who want to focus on their energy. It started as a simple tracking app used to address burnout from the founder and developed into a planning app. Others focus on your mood or journals or even a myopic view of where your energy is going today, but none of them address long term planning or analysis.
Bounded Self's answer:
This tool was built for Engineers, people who thrive on quantified self, and anyone who has gone in and out of emotional burnout where they know the tools work, but just get caught back up in it again as soon as they find a momentary reprieve.