These are the problems we hear most often from makers on WIP, Reddit and Indie Hackers, and the ones I ran into myself while building AimYear. Each one has advice that works with or without any tool, and a short note on how AimYear handles it.
- Why do I keep building instead of marketing?
- How do I choose which side project to work on today?
- How can I make progress with a full-time job?
- Why do I stop using habit trackers after two weeks?
- How do I get back on track after missing days?
- Can I track time with Claude Code or another AI agent?
- How do I know if my week actually moved my goal?
1. Why do I keep building instead of marketing my side project?
"I'm an engineer, so marketing has been the hardest block for me." That line shows up under almost every launch post. Building gives quick, visible progress: a feature works, a test passes. Selling is slow and uncertain, and talking to strangers is uncomfortable. So, without noticing, the easier work replaces the harder one. You stay busy, and the first customer still doesn't come.
What helps
- Do one small selling step first each day: one conversation, one post, one email. Then build.
- Make the step small enough to finish in one sitting. "Do marketing" never gets done; "reply to one thread about my problem" does.
- Notice the swap. Write down when you planned outreach and ended up refactoring instead.
In AimYear: each day has one main step toward your yearly aim. If you start comfortable work while it's still open, AimYear asks you to do the step first. Once it's done, everything else is guilt-free.
2. How do I choose which side project to work on today?
"Work on 3 projects, god knows what I did today." With several projects, every day starts with a choice, and the default is whatever feels most fun. At the end of the week everything moved a little and nothing moved enough.
What helps
- Have one aim for the year with a number, like "15 paying customers". The project closest to that number gets priority.
- Choose one main step for today before you open the editor.
- Judge the day by that step, not by how many projects you touched.
In AimYear: your other projects and paid work are tracked too, so you see how much time really went to the aim and how much went elsewhere.
3. How can I make progress on a side project with a full-time job?
Evenings and weekends feel like a lot of time until you subtract sleep, family, meals and getting from place to place. Most people have far fewer real focus hours than they plan for, and a plan built on imaginary hours fails by Wednesday.
What helps
- Count your real focus windows for a normal week, after everything else you've already committed to.
- Put the main step at the start of one window, while you still have energy.
- Keep it to one or two sessions. A small step most days beats a big plan on weekends.
In AimYear: you tell your agent your weekly commitments once, and it plans around your real focus windows. On a day with no window, nothing is expected.
4. Why do I stop using habit trackers after two weeks?
Most trackers ask for willpower at the worst moment. At 11 pm, a form asks you to explain why you skipped. By week two the answer is "busy", and soon the app isn't opened at all. Streaks make it worse: one bad day resets weeks of work to zero, and the people who need the tool most are the ones it punishes.
What helps
- Track while you work, not afterwards. A record made during the day costs no willpower at night.
- Make any "why did I miss" question optional.
- Drop punishment: no lost streaks, points or money for a missed day.
In AimYear: your own AI agent starts and stops the timer as you work and writes what you did. There's no nightly form.
5. How do I get back on track after missing days?
Missing a few days isn't the problem. Not coming back is. The longer the gap, the bigger the restart feels, so people wait for next Monday or next month.
What helps
- Count comebacks, not streaks. Coming back after a gap is the win worth noticing.
- Restart the same day with the smallest version of the task: five minutes, one message, one paragraph.
- Look at the last 7 days ("4 of 7") instead of an unbroken chain.
In AimYear: small daily checks, like "talk with one person", show up in each day's plan on every device and every agent you use, so a fresh start is always one tick away. A comeback count is on the way.
6. Can I track time with Claude Code or another AI agent?
If you already spend the day in Claude Code, Cursor or ChatGPT, a separate time tracker is one more app to forget. Your agent already knows what you're working on; it can just as well record it.
What helps
- Let the agent start a session when you begin a task and stop it when you finish.
- Let it write a one-line summary of what actually got done, not the task's name again.
- Keep the record on a server, so every device and every agent sees the same day.
In AimYear: AimYear is a hosted MCP server. Connect it to Claude, Claude Code or another MCP client with one link and a sign-in, and your agent handles the timer, the plan and the summaries. It works like an AI accountability partner inside the agent you already use. Connecting is free.
7. How do I know if my week actually moved my goal?
"Busy" and "progress" feel the same from the inside. A week full of work can leave the aim exactly where it was, if the hours went to comfortable tasks.
What helps
- Check two numbers: how much of your work time went to the goal, and how much of that was the hard part.
- Find the step you skipped most often. That's usually the one that matters.
- End each weekly review with one change for next week, not just a summary.
In AimYear: the week summary shows your goal share, your hard-work share, the main-step days and where time leaked, and your agent can turn it into a short review.
Why I built this
I'm a mobile developer with small kids and about 20 focus hours a week, building several products at once. For three weeks I let my AI agent time every work session: 56 sessions, about 45 hours. The lesson was simple and uncomfortable: I build much more than I sell. AimYear is the tool that showed me, and I use it every day to change that.
Valentina Koniukhova, maker of AimYear