🔥 The Grind Behind Building My App: Screen Flows, Focus & Perseverance

Every ambitious app project begins with a grind—not the fun, flashy kind, but the deep, methodical process of documenting every screen, interaction, and flow. This is the unglamorous foundation of product design, and here’s how I’m tackling it head-on.

💻 The Current Grind

I’m in the zone. I’ve been documenting user states, navigation purposes, and writing descriptions for every screen in my Work Photos Calm app. There are a lot of screens—maybe 100+—because every menu item leads to another branch in the tree of interactions. Each screen requires screenshots, notes, and descriptions. This might sound repetitive, but it’s how clarity is forged.

🔑 Why This Matters

• ✅ Clarity: Documenting every flow forces me to define what I’m really building.
• ✅ Foundation: Screen flows lead directly to wireframes, mock-ups, and code.
• ✅ Focus: It’s easy to get lost in tools and dreams—this keeps me grounded.
• ✅ Endurance: This grind builds the perseverance I’ll need later for coding, integrations, and polish.

🛠️ Tools & Exploration

Along the way, I’ve tried AI tools, no-code generators, boilerplates, and repos. I’ve explored VS Code, tinkered with folder structures, and even generated screen flows with AI. Right now, though, it’s not about writing backend code—it’s about specification, clarity, and building the blueprint for everything that comes after.

⚡ The Challenges

• 😅 100+ screens to document—each one demanding time and focus.
• ⏳ Balancing the grind with everyday life (yes, laundry can wait).
• 🚧 Limited backend coding skills, but exploring low-code and AI-generated code options.
• 🔥 Fighting off doubts—will I ever finish this?—while staying determined.

🌱 My Goal

I’ve completed about six or seven screens so far. My target? Finish the full documentation by Tuesday night. No distractions, no endless videos, no social media rabbit holes—just focused work.

🚀 Conclusion

This stage isn’t glamorous, but it’s crucial. The grind of screen flow analysis is what separates ideas from real, functional apps. I may not yet have the full backend skillset, but I’m determined to make this project my magnum opus. Most people won’t try to do something this deep, this hardcore. That’s exactly why I will. 💪

Stay tuned for more updates from the trenches—this is just the beginning of something big. 🌌

The Grind Before The Glory: Documenting Every Screen

There's a special kind of focus that happens when you're deep in the trenches of project work. That zone where the outside world fades away and you're completely immersed in the details. Today, I'm documenting every user state, interaction, and navigation flow for a contractor app – and discovering why this foundational work matters more than you might think.

🎯 The Reality of Screen Flow Documentation

I'm in the zone documenting User states, Interactions, navigation purpose descriptions, and writing notes for all the screens. There's quite a few because there's quite a few menu items. It's a finite dataset - a human being can do this, but most people don't want to go through this grind.

🔄 The Process:

• Click monthly tab → displays monthly subscription packages
• Click yearly tab → displays yearly subscription packages
• Click package → opens another screen in the flow
• Screenshot → describe everything → repeat down the tree

🚀 Why This Foundation Matters

This isn't some simple 20-screen app - we're talking about 100+ screens for a B2B multi-tenant application serving contractors with user accounts, organization accounts, and client accounts.

📋 What Comes Next:

• Wireframes
• Mock-ups
• Style guides
• Programming
• Backend services

🛠️ Tools I'm Exploring:

• AI specification tools
• Replid no-code generators
• Work.com & Loveable
• Cursor for screen flows
• VS Code exploration

💪 The Non-Developer Challenge

The honest truth: I don't have the technical skill to do the backend coding. I'm a non-developer generating code and exploring every option available:

• No-code options
• Low-code platforms
• Boilerplates (yes, I bought one)
• API connections
• Generated code exploration

"The endurance and perseverance required for this is extensive, to say the least. This is going to be my magnum opus."

🎯 Conclusion: Embracing The Grind

This screen flow documentation might seem tedious, but it's the bedrock everything else builds upon. Every feature set, user story, component, database schema, and integration traces back to this foundational work.

🚀 The goal: Finish documentation by Tuesday night. Stop the distractions. Embrace the focus. This is how real things get built.

Back to work I go - the laundry can wait, but this momentum can't. ✨