From experience: how to and how not to use this system.
Don't let perfection become the enemy of progress. Use what helps. Ignore what doesn't. The system isn't demanding anything from you.
When I was designing Axis, I had a concern that stayed with me throughout the entire process. What if someone starts using this and feels like every second has to be accounted for? No open spots on the calendar. Detailed feedback on every session. Zero gaps. The tool that was supposed to reduce their cognitive load becomes its own burden to manage.
It sounds like a strange thing to worry about when you're building a productivity system. But as the feedback loops and tracking and AI analysis took shape, I kept asking myself: how do I limit someone's need to interact with this and still deliver real value? How do I communicate the right and wrong ways to use it before they figure it out the hard way?
The first time I demoed Axis to a few friends, one of the first questions I got was "so do I have to log every minute?" That was never the intent. Not even close.
This article is roughly the north star for not overusing the system. Everything below is what I wish I could tell every new user before they dive in.
Don't treat this like an accounting system. Use it like a budget.#
Think about personal finance for a second. You could track every single cent — categorize your morning coffee, split the gray-area purchases, reconcile every last discrepancy. My personal favorite — you're on a group trip, you front a big expense, people pay you back on Venmo. Your budgeting app goes a little berserk. You overspent and your income is suddenly off. Do you actually go back in and fix it, or do you just log that mentally and move on? Anyone who's actually gotten control of their finances will tell you the same thing: watch the big expenses. Know where your rent, your car payment, your groceries are going — and maybe those subscriptions you forgot you were still paying for. Do that well and you have real power over your budget. The pennies will largely take care of themselves.
Axis is no different. We give you a calendar where you can log every minute of your day. Every session has feedback built in — how did it go, how did you feel, did you accomplish what you set out to do, notes, goal attribution. You could fill all of it out every single time, make every adjustment as your day shifts, keep everything pristine. And your summaries and insights would reflect that.
But after dogfooding this system for over a month, I'm going to tell you it probably doesn't matter. What actually drives the insights is capturing the important stuff — the meaningful sessions, the real drops or peaks in energy, the big interruptions, the accomplishments worth noting. Get those right and the system has what it needs. I think 80% accuracy is a genuinely good target.
If you want to test this yourself, try it both ways. Spend a week logging everything meticulously, then spend a week keeping things intentionally loose. See if the trends line up with your actual experience. The system is yours to experiment with — do what works for you.
Don't try to define everything upfront. Let the block do the work.#
Most task management systems fail the same way. You sign up with good intentions — you're going to log everything, finally get organized. The first candidates are easy: set up bill reminders, add family birthdays. Then you start adding tasks for future plans, ideas, things you might want to do someday. Almost immediately the system becomes unusable. There's a mess of half-defined ideas, things too far in the future to matter right now, and you genuinely can't tell what actually needs your attention. The volume kills it. Humans are only capable of keeping a few key things in working memory at a time — a system that fights that reality isn't a system, it's a source of anxiety.
Axis reverses that. The whole system is oriented around the near term — a week or two out at most for anything execution-oriented. When you add a task, you set a date, and the system makes sure it surfaces when it actually matters. That creates a natural forcing function — you become more discerning about what actually deserves to be a task in the first place. Axis was designed so you can annihilate execution for the current week, without burdening yourself by thinking too far into the future.
But here's the more important thing: not everything needs to be a task at all. Sometimes you don't know exactly what a block of work entails. The important thing is just to carve out the time — to think, define, and execute all in one session. Axis is built around the idea that how you spend your time matters more than how precisely you defined the work in advance. So create a block, give it a rough direction, skip the task if you don't need one. Let it show up on your schedule and knock it out.
Don't stress about ignoring your plan. Just note it and move on.#
Axis sets up your ideal week based on everything it knows about you and what you tell it for the week ahead. In practice, that week will never happen exactly as planned. Calls come up, priorities shift, and some days you just don't feel like doing what you scheduled three days ago. That's not a problem — it's expected.
You have options for how to handle it. Leave the block structure as is and drop a quick note — "big emergency came up, had to deal with it." Or spend five seconds in the AI chat, tell it how your day actually went, and it will update your schedule for you. Mention the emergency and the note gets logged with the block automatically. The whole thing takes seconds. We understood that keeping an accurate log of your day is genuinely hard, so we made every effort to make reconciling it as painless as possible.
However you decide to handle it, the AI analysis is going to pick it up. It's reading your patterns, your deviations, your notes — all of it. You don't need a pristine log for it to give you something useful. Give it rough material and it will still find signal. That 80% target we mentioned earlier? This is exactly what that looks like in practice.
Stop leaving feedback altogether? It'll notice that too. It's not a failure, just more data.
Don't use the system every single day like your life depends on it. Leave some days open.#
As a firm believer in this system, I genuinely don't think it's healthy to run it at 100% all the time. Take some days and keep the schedule completely open. Don't be afraid to tell the AI to cancel the rest of your day — I do it. Just let it go.
The majority of people who get real value from Axis genuinely need the level of structure it provides. But it's also completely normal to let the mind wander. Maybe that means stepping away from work entirely — closing the laptop, going outside, doing something that has nothing to do with productivity. Or maybe it means staying in work mode but letting impulse and curiosity take over. Spend half a day jumping from topic to topic. Follow a thread because it's interesting, not because it's on the schedule. Let the day be unstructured and see where it goes.
The system will be there when you come back. Log it or don't — it doesn't matter.
Axis is a machine. People are people.
Don't let the system become its own source of pressure.#
We used cognitive research to design Axis. We wanted the best science available to understand how people actually get things done, and we're genuinely proud of what we built. But it comes with a caveat worth naming directly.
The feedback loops are powerful. Watching your goal hours accumulate is satisfying. Seeing your deep work stack up, tracking your energy day by day, letting the AI read back all your amazing accomplishments from the week that you reported — it's almost dopaminergic. That's intentional. But those same loops can become too powerful. If you find yourself obsessing over the tracking, optimizing for the metrics, feeling guilty when the numbers don't look right — that's the system working against you, not for you.
The whole thesis of Axis is structure, priorities, protected energy, and overall wellbeing. There is no other time management system that treats recovery as a first class citizen in your schedule — that's a core principle, not a feature. Helping you maintain your energy and your agency is the point. Allowing yourself to become consumed with obsessive tracking runs completely counter to that.
Our pricing model reflects this. We don't depend on time spent on the site, clicks, or data added. It's purely subscription based. We don't benefit from constant engagement and we don't want to — we just want you to get the most out of it in a way that actually works for you.
So don't let perfection become the enemy of progress. Use what helps. Ignore what doesn't. The system isn't demanding anything from you.
A final note.#
Every point in this piece is really saying the same thing: don't let the pursuit of perfection get in the way of progress. The system is designed to meet you wherever you are. Maybe you're starting at zero — no structure, no logging, just a rough idea of what your week looks like. Getting to 20% of what Axis is capable of next week is a meaningful improvement. Hitting 50% the week after that? That's a real shift. The direction matters more than the destination.
Use what helps. Ignore what doesn't. Come back to the rest when you're ready.
Personally, it's improved my work life materially. That's the honest version.
Signed,
A Daily User of This Thing