After I created the first version of EBO for myself, I discovered one of the easiest traps in building something:
Adding features feels exactly like making progress.
The original idea was relatively simple. I wanted to understand how I was spending my time and become more consistent with studying.
But once I saw the first pieces working, simplicity stopped feeling exciting.
Every new possibility made the project appear more complete. A tracker could become a productivity system. A productivity system could have rewards. Rewards could have points, achievements, themes, and unlockable items.
Soon, I was no longer building only the small tool I originally needed.
I was building everything I could imagine around it.
The project kept expanding
The early EBO included—or at different points considered—study tracking, sleep tracking, wasted-time tracking, points, rewards, achievements, themes, music, challenges, progress views, and social study ideas.
Some of these ideas were genuinely connected to the problem.
Progress views could help make effort visible. Focus sessions could make beginning easier. Studying alongside trusted people could make the experience feel less isolated.
Other ideas were included mainly because they sounded fun to build.
I imagined currencies, large reward systems, cosmetic options, collections of achievements, and increasingly complicated ways to turn studying into a game.
Individually, each feature seemed defensible.
Together, they created a product that was becoming larger without necessarily becoming more useful.
Why features felt so convincing
Features are visible.
You can point to a new screen, button, animation, theme, or achievement and say, “I built this today.”
The harder parts of product development are much less satisfying in the moment.
Questioning an assumption does not produce a colourful screen. Removing an unnecessary idea does not look impressive in a progress update. Spending hours deciding that a feature should not exist can feel like completing no work at all.
At that stage, I measured progress by how much EBO contained.
More features meant more effort.
More effort appeared to mean a better product.
I had not yet understood that complexity can grow much faster than value.
Gamification seemed like the answer
Studying often feels repetitive, so turning progress into a game seemed logical.
If students earned points for focused effort, unlocked achievements for consistency, and received visible rewards for returning, perhaps studying would become easier to maintain.
There is still something interesting in that idea.
The problem was not that every form of gamification was automatically useless. The problem was that I began treating gamification as an answer before properly defining the question.
Would points help someone begin a difficult study session?
Would achievements encourage healthy consistency—or simply create another number to chase?
Would rewards support the habit, or eventually become more important than the studying itself?
Could someone appear productive inside the system without doing meaningful work?
The more I thought about it, the less comfortable I became with rewarding activity merely because it could be measured.
A productivity product should not confuse interaction with progress.
A collection of features is not a product
I eventually had to confront a basic question:
If I removed the themes, points, music, badges, and rewards, what valuable behaviour would remain?
That question was uncomfortable because it exposed how much of the project’s identity depended on additions rather than purpose.
A product is not valuable because it contains many things.
It is valuable when its parts work together to help someone make meaningful progress on a real problem.
For EBO, that problem was not that students lacked enough productivity features. There were already countless timers, task managers, trackers, and study applications.
The deeper problem seemed to involve the gap between intention and action.
Students can genuinely want to study and still struggle to begin. They can start strongly and gradually disappear from their routine. When they study alone, delay and inconsistency can remain invisible until a large amount of time has passed.
A bigger reward store would not automatically solve that.
Neither would another theme.
The cost of every addition
Each new feature also created responsibilities I had initially ignored.
It needed to work correctly. It needed to make sense beside everything else. It needed to behave properly when information was missing or incorrect. It needed to remain usable on different screens and understandable to someone who had not designed it.
A reward system needed fair rules.
Tracking required accurate data.
Social features introduced questions about privacy and behaviour.
Progress statistics could motivate someone, but they could also mislead or discourage them.
Even a harmless-looking feature could make the product more confusing.
The technical complexity grew too. My ambitions were moving much faster than my ability to build and maintain a reliable system.
AI could help me generate another feature, but generated code did not remove the consequences of adding it.
Every addition still became something I was responsible for understanding, testing, and eventually supporting.
Learning to remove ideas
The project began improving when I stopped treating every idea as an instruction.
An idea could be interesting without belonging in EBO.
A feature could be technically possible without being worth building.
Something could be postponed without being abandoned forever.
I started thinking about whether each feature strengthened the central experience or distracted from it. Ideas such as large cosmetic systems, complicated currencies, extensive music libraries, and endless achievements no longer deserved automatic priority.
The question changed from:
Would this be cool?
to:
Does this help someone begin, continue, or return to meaningful study?
That question did not instantly solve the product, but it gave me a way to judge its pieces.
Progress sometimes means building less
This was one of the first times I understood that restraint is part of building.
Earlier, deleting an idea felt like losing progress. Later, I began seeing removal as evidence that my understanding had improved.
The early feature-heavy version of EBO was not pointless. It allowed me to experiment, discover what interested me, and experience the consequences of uncontrolled scope.
But it also taught me that enthusiasm needs direction.
Without a clear problem, a project can become an exhibition of everything its creator knows how to add.
That is not what I want EBO to become.
I still enjoy imagining features. I still sometimes become attached to ideas before they have earned their place. The difference is that I now try to challenge them before allowing them to shape the product.
EBO began growing when I learned how to add things.
It began becoming a product when I learned that some things should be left out.