About Us

How this started

In 2020, Lawrence, a network security engineer, started working from home full time. The boundary between work and not-work dissolved almost immediately. The burnout built slowly -- not dramatic, just a steady erosion until he couldn't motivate himself to do much of anything.

The usual fixes came and went: mindfulness apps, journaling, detachment exercises. Each one helped for a bit, then didn't. The tools weren't bad. They just weren't answering the right question.

From Gut Feeling to Data

Lawrence started tracking his energy in a simple mobile app he built for himself. Just logging what activities cost him, over time. After a couple weeks, the patterns were hard to ignore. For the first time, he could see where the energy was actually going.

Around the same time, he discovered envelope-based budgeting, where every dollar has a job before you spend it. The parallel was impossible to ignore: what if you could allocate emotional energy the same way? Give every unit of energy a purpose before the world spends it for you?

He tested the concept in a spreadsheet. It worked. By budgeting energy the way people budget money, he could see where his capacity was going and make actual choices about it. Same idea as YNAB or envelope budgeting, just applied to the resource that was actually running out.

Why “Bounded Self”?

The name comes from the economic principle of bounded rationality, the recognition that humans can never be perfectly rational because there is simply too much information to process. Instead, we make the best decisions we can within the boundaries of what we're aware of.

That's exactly what emotional energy tracking is. We can't monitor every signal our body and mind send us. But we can self-report, record, and study the energy we are conscious of, and use that bounded awareness to make better choices about how we live.

What We Believe

Most productivity tools care about output: tasks completed, hours logged. Bounded Self starts with what things cost you, then connects those costs to what you actually did. The result is a picture of where your energy goes, so you can make choices about it instead of running on autopilot.

Your data is yours. We believe in your right to access your data and your right to be forgotten. Not because regulators require it, but because it's the right thing to do.

Honest pricing, always. We don't hide fees. We don't bury costs. The price you see is the price you pay, taxes included.

Built to be useful. Bounded Self exists to help people see where their energy goes and do something about it.

See where your energy goes.