Why I Built Bloomind: Remembering What Matters in a World Fighting for Our Focus

Have you ever heard a piece of advice that felt like it could change your life, and a week later you couldn't even remember what it was?

That happened to me more times than I'd like to admit. And after a while I realized it wasn't just about forgetting a quote or a tip. I was forgetting the things I actually wanted to become.

This is the story of why I built Bloomind, what problem I'm trying to solve, and how building it turned into a challenge of its own.

Learning never stops, in code and in life

I've been on my self-improvement path for the last 5 or 6 years. During that time I noticed something that I already knew very well from my job as a software developer.

In programming, you can't stop learning. Languages change, frameworks come and go, and the moment you stop learning, you start falling behind. It turns out life works in a very similar way. If you want your life to get better, you need to keep learning and discovering new things, about your health, your relationships, your work and yourself.

Luckily, there is no shortage of great material. Over the years I found so many helpful lessons in books and podcasts. Some of them really changed how I think and how I live.

The problem: I kept forgetting

But there was a catch. I would read a book, highlight the parts I liked, listen to a great podcast episode, and feel motivated. Then, a few weeks later, most of it was gone.

Even worse, I would forget what I was striving for. The goals and principles that felt so clear while I was reading slowly faded away, and I would fall back into the same old habits.

Later I learned that this is completely normal. Our memory drops very fast after we learn something, unless we come back to it. I wrote about the science behind this, and what you can do about it, in How to Remember What You Read: 7 Techniques That Actually Work.

The bigger problem: everyone is fighting for our focus

There was another thing I couldn't ignore. Today's technology, and social media especially, is built to compete for our attention. Every app wants a few more minutes of our time, and they're really good at getting them.

I believe this is one of the crucial issues of our time. Endless feeds train us to jump from one thing to another, and slowly we lose the ability to focus and think deeply. I noticed it on myself too. I would pick up the phone "just for a second" and find myself doomscrolling twenty minutes later, without remembering a single thing I saw.

And here's the ironic part. Those same twenty minutes could have been spent revisiting ideas that actually make my life better.

The idea: replace doomscrolling with revisiting

That's when the idea for Bloomind came together. What if the urge to grab the phone could lead you back to your own best ideas, instead of another feed?

So I decided to build an app that helps readers and learners do two things:

Save the notes, quotes and advice they find in books and podcasts, in one place.
Revisit those ideas regularly, so they stay in memory and keep guiding their life.

The second part is where most tools fail, including the ones I used myself. Saving is easy. Coming back is hard, because there is nothing pulling you back. Social media figured out long ago how to make us come back, so I thought: why not use some of those same ideas for something good?

That's why Bloomind is built around gamifying the habit of revisiting. It keeps track of when you last looked at each note and shows you how many you're starting to forget. In Play mode it brings back the notes you haven't seen in the longest time, using spaced repetition, and you can watch your mastery grow across different areas of your life. Instead of an endless feed, you get a short session with the ideas you chose to remember.

A personal challenge: from Android developer to KMP and Swift

There was also a second, more selfish reason behind Bloomind. For years I've been working as an Android developer, and I wanted to push myself out of my comfort zone.

I wanted Bloomind to be available on both Android and iOS, so I took it as an opportunity to learn Kotlin Multiplatform (KMP) and Swift. KMP let me reuse my Kotlin knowledge and share code between the two platforms, while learning Swift gave me a much better understanding of how the iOS side works.

It wasn't always easy, but it was exactly the kind of learning I was writing about above. And in a way, Bloomind helped me build Bloomind, because I was saving the lessons I learned along the way.

Final thoughts

Bloomind started from a simple frustration: I was learning a lot and keeping very little. I hope it can help you hold on to the ideas that matter to you, and maybe spend a few less minutes scrolling and a few more minutes growing.

If you have any questions or feedback, or you just want to share how you remember what you learn, you can always reach me on X, where I'm sharing the journey of building Bloomind. You can also find my other articles on Medium.

Thanks for reading!