Mission
“Build software that returns agency to users rather than extracting it from them.”
I built Axis because I needed it.
I've spent close to twenty years trying every productivity tool and time management system I could find. None of them stuck. I'd get a few good weeks out of something, then drift back to the same default — reacting to whatever showed up first.
Two months into a sabbatical after 13 years in enterprise software, I had more freedom than I'd had in years — and no idea how to use it well.
I wanted to brush up on skills I'd let go stale, take courses in things that genuinely interested me, get back to a real health and fitness routine, explore business ideas, stay current on the world again. All real priorities. All pulling in different directions. The problem wasn't motivation. It was coordination.
So I sat down with pen and paper and drew out an ideal week — a hand-drawn calendar, hour by hour, mapping what type of work goes where based on those priorities. Not perfectly. Not maximized. Just realistically.
That first version took two hours. It worked better than anything I'd tried before. A few days later, I realized maintaining it manually was unsustainable. A week after that, I had wireframes. A week after that, a working calendar. A week after that, AI was part of the system.
The moment it really clicked was when I reached for my phone to log some notes and tasks — only to realize I hadn't built the mobile app yet. That's when I knew this had gone from a personal system to something worth building for real.
I didn't convince myself this would work. I noticed I was already using it. That was enough.
— Ross R., Founder, RMR Products
Whole-life by design
The work, the courses, the fitness, the side ideas — all real.
That's where Axis comes from. Not a work-planner that grudgingly lets you log a workout — a single architecture for the whole week. Deep work and recovery in the same system, because that's how the day actually unfolds.
What decides what ships
Five principles, and the features they rule out.
Most product principles are written after the fact — the product gets built, someone writes a values page, the values page gets ignored. These are the reason Axis is shaped the way it is, and the reason a few obvious-seeming features are never going to ship.
When a feature looks good in isolation but breaks one of them, the principle wins. You can hold a product to its stated principles — that is the test of whether they are real. The product pages on this site are built so you can check.
01
Plans are hypotheses.
A plan is a hypothesis about how the next stretch of time will go, based on what you knew when you made it. New information arrives by Tuesday afternoon. A plan that doesn’t change in response to new information isn’t a plan — it’s a wish.
Most tools treat the original schedule as the contract, so when reality diverges you are the one who failed: you drag the block, you feel slightly worse about yourself, you move on. Axis treats the divergence as the finding. A cancelled deep-work block is telling you something specific — the meeting before it ran long, you under-slept, the project didn’t actually need that work, or you are avoiding it for a reason worth knowing.
02
Agency, not automation.
A planning tool can do almost anything for you now. Take your goals, take your calendar, take your chronotype, output a filled week. The temptation to ship that is real, and Axis doesn’t, for one reason: a tool that makes all your choices for you doesn’t help you get better at making them yourself. The week looks fine and the user gets weaker.
So the AI suggests and never decides. Every change waits in a panel where you accept or reject it one item at a time, and nothing auto-applies. That is more friction than full automation, and the friction is the point — it is the moment you confirm what you actually want instead of being drifted into a week you didn’t choose.
03
Completion compounds.
Every unfinished thing is a small open claim on attention — a background tax on decisions you aren’t even making about it. The cost compounds: the next thing you start arrives with all the prior unfinished things still attached, so you start fewer, the ones you start are smaller, and ambition quietly concedes to overhead.
So Axis is biased toward visibility on what isn’t finishing. Goal effort is shown against the original estimate. The weekly review asks what carried over as well as what closed. Goals carry a “what happens if this slips” field, because most goals don’t have one and most goals slip. None of that is about hustle — it’s about giving yourself less reason to dread the list you already have.
04
Frictionless.
If using the system feels like work, you’ll stop using it. Every checkbox to flip and status to update is a tax, and when the tax gets high enough people log in, see everything needing maintenance, and close the tab. A planner that takes real effort to maintain loses to one that doesn’t, every time.
Which makes this the most expensive principle to honor, because done right it is invisible. Auto-save instead of save buttons. Defaults that work the first time. Session feedback as two taps rather than a form. Habits as binary checks rather than streaks. Each one is a small battle at the edge of the implementation, and together they are the difference between a tool you use and a tool you quit.
05
Research-driven.
Hundreds of small numbers get encoded into a planner. How long is a deep-work block? How much recovery gets inserted after one? What is a sustainable weekly cap on focused work? Multiplied across every user, each of those shapes the system — and making them on instinct was never going to hold up.
So the product follows the literature where the literature is solid, and says so where it isn’t. Context-switching costs and recovery biology hold up well. Ego depletion is the headline failure of the replication crisis, and the parole-study citation everyone quotes is contested. Where the research is contested or the individual variation is wide, Axis builds in flexibility instead of locking in a number. Research is the starting point; your behavior is the ground truth.
Get in touch
How to reach me
Feedback, bug reports, feature requests, or just thinking out loud about how you plan your week — I read everything.
info@axisplanner.aiIf this sounds like the way you think about work, give it a try.
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