Notes & Knowledge

ADHD Telegram bot: why not an app you'd have to open

The apps I abandoned weren't badly built — each check-in was tolerable, and tolerable is exactly the problem.

disclaimer: these posts are not medical advice and provided as information only, with no guarantees

Published 4 Sept 20266 min readBy Leonid Chindelevitch

A clock crumbling at the edges, with a sticky note that says Out at 5:40

Herding Chickens lives inside Telegram. There's no app to download, and a move to WhatsApp is planned for later this year.

That surprises people, so here's the reasoning.

The short version

The apps weren't bad
Some lasted days, some lasted minutes. None of them were broken. They did exactly what they said.
Tolerable is the problem
Open it, tap through, mark the thing, close it, resume. Each round is fine. That's why the cost is invisible.
Trackers need the habit you came for
A daily tracker asks you to reliably remember to log things — which is the capability you downloaded it to get.
You never decide to stop
Novelty wears off, and you just quietly stop. There's no moment where you quit.

The apps I didn't keep

I've tried a lot of productivity tools over the years. Some lasted a few days. Some lasted a few minutes.

One I still have installed, because I bought a lifetime membership for it. It's been years since I last opened it.

It's a habit tracker. You enter the habits you want to do daily, and each day you check in on a grid: did the thing, or didn't. And as far as that goes, it does exactly what it's supposed to. It isn't broken and it isn't badly made.

The friction is that you have to remember, every single day — ideally every single time you actually do the thing — to go and record it.

At the beginning that's easy enough. The first week or two, maybe, you do it consistently. Then the novelty wears off, the interest wanes, and you stop. Or at least I did.

A tracker asks you for the habit you came to build

This is the unavoidable part.

To get value from a daily habit tracker, you need to reliably remember to do a small thing every day without being prompted. That is the exact capability you downloaded a habit tracker in order to acquire.

If you were already the sort of person who never forgets to log something, you'd probably have less need for the grid. The same shape shows up in a lot of productivity software: it works well for people who are already organised, which is a real audience, but not the one that goes looking.

📸 Screenshot placeholder — a habit-tracker-style grid, or the app's own check-in for contrast.

Tolerable is the problem

The lifetime membership shows where the real cost was. I paid once, permanently, and the money was never the issue. The cost was per day, and it was small.

Each round of it is tolerable. Open the app, tap through to today, mark the task, close it, go back to what you were doing. No single instance of that is bad enough to complain about.

And that's precisely why it wins. Costs you'd object to get dealt with. Costs just below the threshold of objection accumulate, and the way they show up is not a decision to quit. It's that you notice, months later, that you stopped. There's no moment where you decide. It's hard to design against if the tool's basic move is come here and tell me things.

So live where the person already is

Messaging services are things we already use in everyday life. We're used to having messages arrive in the middle of the day — you quickly note something down, quickly take an action, and go back to what you were doing. That loop is already there. You didn't have to build it.

It's not completely seamless. But it's a lot less friction.

And if you're in a good state, a state of flow, you probably don't need to tolerate any major interruption. But a quick check-in might be the thing that keeps you on track when you're not — and hyperfocus is worth protecting when it's pointed at the right thing.

The nudge doesn't disappear on you. It stays until you press a button, and no new nudges surface while it's waiting — so leaving it for three hours costs you one message, not a pile of them. And when you do press nudge me again later, the next one comes at the right time: the interval from when you pressed, not from whenever the first one fired. So answering late doesn't leave you owing a backlog.

Compare that with a grid, where every day you don't log is another empty cell and the emptiness adds up in front of you. Here there's nothing counting: no badge, no streak broken by silence, nothing sitting on your home screen. An interruption you don't notice isn't an interruption.

And what the check-in asks is narrow on purpose: are you on your main? Not whether you're working hard enough. Just a question, from somewhere other than inside your own head, about the one thing you picked this morning.

One really nice thing about Telegram

We can display all the tasks you've previously chosen right there in the same interface. And whether you're working on your phone or on your laptop, you get at exactly the same information.

We're not there yet

The goal of making this app — and we're not quite there yet, I have to be honest about that — is to give you a tool that lets you bring everything in. Things from your email, things from your calendar, things from your notes, and so on.

Only once it becomes a seamless experience do I really believe you'll stick with it, keep using it, and benefit from it.

Because the easiest habits to form are the ones that integrate easily into how you already live your life and how you work. Telegram seemed like a reasonable starting point for exactly that reason: it's already in your day. WhatsApp is next, because more people are already there.

If you want to try the current version: join the waitlist. It runs in Telegram, and there's nothing to install.

Keep reading

Herding Chickens is a productivity app in development, not medical advice, therapy, or an ADHD diagnosis. If you are struggling, talk to a qualified clinician. In the UK, start with the NHS ADHD in adults page.

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