Today I focused on basically one thing: goals.
This is the big feature. This is the reason I started building SMTool in the first place.
For a long time I've been tracking my content creation goals in my Getting Things Done application, NextApp. It never really worked. I had actions like "post on TikTok", "post on LinkedIn", "post on Reddit", "write blog post", and various blog series episodes all sitting there as actions. Some of them repeated automatically at whatever frequency I wanted to publish. The problem wasn't getting reminders. The problem was distribution.
I had one recurring task called "plan content" every third day, where I would try to figure out what to publish over the next few days. But three days is not the horizon you need if you want to be consistent, maintain variety, and actually enjoy the process.
When I create content, I approach it the same way I approach software development. I create something because I think it has value. I'm not interested in producing content just for the sake of producing content. I'm not monetizing content. I'm not trying to become an influencer. I've been creating content for most of my life simply because I enjoy it.
I did it long before Social Media or even the WWW was invented.
When I was fourteen, I made money writing assignments for other students in school. If there was a history paper or some other writing assignment, people could buy different quality levels. Pay a little and get something that would barely pass. Pay a bit more and get something decent. Pay a lot and get something exceptional. I always delivered. I remember one assignment where the teacher read three submissions aloud to the class. One was terrible. One was perfectly okay. One was genuinely excellent. By the time he reached the third one, the entire class was laughing because everyone knew I had written all three.
Around the same age I started writing articles for magazines. Back then there were publications that would accept manuscripts by mail, evaluate them, and literally send you a check if they decided to publish. That financed most of my private life from age fourteen until I got my first real job at seventeen.
I kept writing after that. I published articles in various magazines and later wrote a book about hardware.
Even before the internet became what we know today, I was publishing online. Some of the first software I wrote in C was essentially a Gopher-like system for bulletin board services. People could dial in, browse content, publish their own articles, or download things that other people (mostly me) had written.
In 1996 I got my own domain name and started publishing on my own websites. For a few years my personal homepage was one of the most visited private websites in the Norwegian corner of the internet.
Content creation wasn't limited to writing. I spent a couple of years working at a local radio station, where I read and presented material I had written specifically for various shows. I also worked in a kindergarten for two years. At home I would write stories tailored to the children's age, development, and the challenges they were facing. The next day I would read them to groups of seven to fifteen children and a handful of adults. I wrote songs for them too and even produced some music that I published online in the early 1990s. By today's standards it wasn't particularly good, but I wanted to do it, so I did it.
That's really the common thread through all of this. I've been creating content for decades because I enjoy it and because I feel it provides value. That's also why I still publish today. It's not about attention. It's not about personal branding. It's not about marketing for the sake of marketing. I want to make things that are useful, interesting, entertaining, or thought-provoking.
The modern social media ecosystem runs on an endless stream of content. Platforms like LinkedIn, Reddit, YouTube, and TikTok need people creating constantly so they can keep feeding fresh material to their users. A lot of what gets produced is complete garbage.
I don't want to produce garbage. I want to create things that are worth somebody's time. That's where SMTool comes in. I need a system that gives me variety, helps me follow topics over time, and lets me deliberately allocate attention to things that matter. Some of that is personal projects. Some of it is open source software. If people discover and use my open source work, that's great. I genuinely appreciate it. It gives me no direct value whatsoever, but it's still nice.
Then there are the commercial products my company builds. Those products need customers. That's the only part of my content creation that has any commercial motivation behind it. I don't want that to dominate what I publish, but I don't want to completely ignore it either. For a small software company, Social Media content is one of the few marketing channels available.
This became a much longer blog post than I intended.
Back to goals.
The goals system is the heart of SMTool.
This is where I define the cadence and distribution of everything I want to create. How often I want to publish on different platforms. How frequently I want to write about specific topics. How much should be long-form versus short-form. How much should be original content versus derived content. How much short-form content should be generated from long-form material.
I don't use X. I don't feel particularly comfortable hanging out in what the Pivot podcast used to call the Nazi bar. So for me it's about platforms like LinkedIn, Reddit, BlueSky, TikTok, blogs, and whatever comes next.
The goal system needs to make it possible to collect lots of ideas, stay creative, use only the best ones, and still maintain the balance I want across topics and channels.
That's the core of SMTool. And that's what I built today.
Interestingly, most of the design came to me during meditation. This happens all the time. If I sit down and actively try to come up with ideas, my mind goes completely blank. But the moment I start meditating, my brain becomes hyperactive. It starts throwing ideas at me from every direction in a desperate attempt to distract me from breathing.
Today it worked. I designed how goals are defined, how they are represented in the database, how progress is tracked, how completed work is measured against targets, and how all of that is presented in the dashboard.
It's a huge feature and probably the most important one in the entire application.
I think it works. And if it doesn't, I'll iterate until it does.
Eventually it will be perfect.