Written 22 October 2026. Product details describe RiD Flow as it stood at the time of writing.
In August I removed the feature that RiD Flow had been designed around. It compared the day you planned with the day you had, side by side. It was one of the first things I built after the recording itself — and my own website kept leading with it for weeks after it was gone.
I took it out in version 0.52.0.
The idea was simple. In the morning you block out your day: two hours on this project, an hour on that. In the evening the tracker shows you where reality drifted from the plan.
What happened in practice was subtler. The plan was quietly turning into the result. Planned time leaked into the numbers that were supposed to describe what I had done, and a day I meant to spend on a project started to read like a day I had spent on it.
Nothing crashed. Every number looked reasonable. That was the problem: a tracker that turns intentions into results is not measuring your day. It is agreeing with you.
I could have patched the specific leak. I decided against it, because the leak was a symptom of the design, not a bug in it. As long as the plan sat inside the measurement, every future change would have to be checked for the same mistake, and the failure mode is invisible. It flatters you, and flattery does not file bug reports.
So the plan came out of the measurement entirely.
Two things.
First, the top of the day became the gap: the hours Flow cannot explain from what it recorded. Not a pie chart of categories, but the time that doesn’t add up. You can name those hours afterwards — a call, an errand, a drive — but they start out as what they are: unexplained.
Second, planning stayed, in a smaller role. You can still block out time in advance. When the block is over, Flow asks one question — did it hold? — and stores your answer like any other note. No number in the app is calculated from the plan.
The features you are proudest of are the ones you check least. This one sat at the centre of the product, on the website, in my own head — and it was the one making the data less honest.
The test I use now is short: if a feature makes the day look better than it was, it doesn’t belong in a tracker. A tool that grades you gets closed after a week. A tool that flatters you is worse, because you keep it.
RiD Flow is a time tracker for Windows 11, in development. Join the waitlist to hear when it is ready.