What this is: my own story. Not medical advice, not a recommendation, not a treatment. I am a developer, not a doctor. What worked for me may mean nothing at all for you — and whatever you take or change, discuss it with someone trained for it. The names in here are in here because this is my story — not because anyone should copy it.
I have ADHD. Diagnosed, not self-assembled from search results. And the part of it that has cost me the most time is not concentration and not restlessness. It is forgetting.
Not the big forgetting — appointments, birthdays, I manage those, that is what calendars are for. I mean the small, daily kind. I am standing in the kitchen, the glass of water is already half empty, and I no longer know whether I took something earlier or only thought about taking it. Between those two there is roughly nothing in my head.
The sentence that set this off
There is one sentence I must have thought a thousand times over the years. In the afternoon, usually around four, when nothing is moving and I have already started a third half-thing:
“What on earth is going on today?”
And about a minute later, every time: Ah, damn. I forgot to take XY again.
It is not a dramatic moment. It is a ridiculously small one. But it happened so often that it stopped being a coincidence. And that was the point where I realised: I do not have a discipline problem. I have a memory problem — and for that you do not need a stricter version of yourself, you need a piece of paper.
What changed
At some point I started eating fewer carbohydrates and more protein. Not out of any ideology, not because of a book — I simply tried it, because I had run out of other things to change. Creatine and omega-3 came with it, and the least spectacular change of all: more water.
And I felt better. Calmer through the day, less of that afternoon hole, more focused, more productive.
That is not proof. I have no training for it, I have no study design, and I have a sample size of one — me. I changed several things at once, so to this day I do not know which of them did anything and which was merely along for the ride. That is exactly the point.
Because the question that came out of it was not “what should I take”. It was: how would I even know? I had a feeling and not a single note. And a feeling stretched over three weeks is about the least reliable measuring instrument there is — it remembers the good days differently from the bad ones.
So it suddenly mattered whether I had actually taken and eaten it or not. As long as nothing depends on it, forgetting is fine. The moment something does, it is annoying.
Why every app failed for me
I tried apps. Several. They were all well built, that is not the problem. The problem was the morning.
At a quarter past seven, cup in one hand, here is what I do not want to do. Open the app. Tap plus. Find the category, find the item, type the amount, pick the unit from a dropdown, confirm the time, save. That is twelve seconds. Twelve seconds sound like nothing.
But I am lazy. And I do not mean that coyly, I mean it as a fact about me: if something has twelve seconds of friction every single day, I stop doing it after two weeks. First I skip a day. Then two. After three weeks the record has more gaps than entries, and a record like that answers not one single question — not even the one I started for.
That is the real mistake in almost every tracking app: it optimises the analysis. Nice charts, weekly comparisons, progress bars. But the analysis is worthless if the data has gaps. And whether it has gaps is not decided in the analysis. It is decided at a quarter past seven in the morning.
What I actually wanted
Four things, no more:
- It has to be faster than thinking. I did not want to type. I wanted to say what I took and then walk on.
- It has to remember for me. Not push me, not grade me — just hold on to what happened, so that in the afternoon I can look instead of guess.
- I want to actually see how I am doing. Not as a score out of ten, but as what actually happened, side by side, with the time.
- And I do not want to have to remember to do it. How I am doing is the one thing I record reliably only when I do not have to think of it myself.
That became RecTake. You hold a button and say a sentence — “two capsules of magnesium and a coffee” — and afterwards two entries are there, with the time. No form, no category to scroll through, no unit from a dropdown.
The question that comes on its own
The food and the capsules are one half. The other is the thing I actually wanted to know: how I was doing that day. And that is precisely the half I would never have logged. People who feel fine do not think of noting it. People who feel bad think of it even less.
So the app asks by itself. Not constantly and not as a popup in the middle of the day, but a while after an entry, once, on a scale with five steps. Two seconds, tap a step, done. If you do not want to answer, you skip it and it is gone.
That one question is what turns a list of intakes into something that can answer a question. Side by side on an hour axis: what I took, what I ate and drank, and how I felt afterwards. After three weeks you see things there that you do not see in your head.
What it deliberately does not do
The app never tells me I should take something now. At most it tells me that nothing has been logged today. Between “you have not noted it” and “you should take it” lies the whole difference, and it is built that way because that is what I need: I want a notebook, not a trainer.
There is no streak that breaks. No points. No bar that stays empty and looks at me. A skipped day is simply a day without an entry — not a failure with an icon on it.
And it draws no conclusions. It does not tell me my afternoon was better because of what I took in the morning. It cannot possibly know that, and I think an app that pretends it does is more dangerous than one that stays quiet. It lays out what happened — cleanly, completely, with the time. Working out what is good for you and what is not is then up to you. But you can only do it once it is written down — and when it gets serious, you do it with someone who has a licence to practise.
And the data
What I take, when I feel bad, whether I had a headache — that is about the most private thing I have. So the entries live in a database on the phone. Not on a server, not in an account, not with me. I could not read them if I wanted to.
One thing I should be honest about: you do need an account — not for the entries, but for the subscription; it knows your email address and nothing else about you. The voice recording, by contrast, does not leave the device. The phone’s operating system turns the sound into text, the same way it does when you dictate on the keyboard. As of 11 September 2026: before that the recording went into the EU to be turned into text, and that route has been removed. What still goes where is on the home page and in the privacy policy.
Why I am telling you this
Not because my story is special. But because I think quite a lot of people have the same afternoon I do — that “what on earth is going on today” — and then find they do not know what actually happened. Not because they did not want to know. Because writing it down would have taken twelve seconds and they did not have them.
The app does not solve my ADHD. It solves nothing at all. It only lowers the effort per entry far enough that I actually make the entry. That is all I ever wanted — and all it promises.
Once more, because it matters: this text describes my own experience. It is not medical advice and not a recommendation, and RecTake is not a medical device — the app makes no diagnosis, gives no dosage advice and is no substitute for medical or pharmaceutical advice.