firstlight – you can’t doomscroll a piece of paper

I’d reached the point where reaching for my phone first thing in the morning felt obviously bad and I just couldn’t stop. The scroll wasn’t even rewarding anymore, it was a reflex. I wanted a different default. You can’t doomscroll a piece of paper. We still read a physical newspaper in the morning, because I’m old and old habits die hard. Newspapers are great for reading deeply and discovering things outside your algorithmic bubble, but they’re terrible at surfacing the specific information you actually care about day-to-day. I built a small app called Firstlight. Every morning, before I wake up, it prints a single page of the stuff I actually want to know: the weather, what’s on my calendar, last night’s scores, a few news headlines, and my to-do list. With a piece of paper I can make notes or check things off my todo later in the day. A printed page is a nice default. It doesn’t notify me. There are no pop-ups. It’s the information I chose. It also turns out to be the right amount…