Why I Built 5 Versions of Myself
If you’re an indie developer, you already know the feeling.
You wake up and you’re supposed to be a programmer. But you also need to do marketing. And you had that business idea to think through. And you haven’t studied for something new in a week. And you really should go for a walk.
It’s not that you’re lazy. It’s that you have too many identities, and they’re all wanting to go at the same time.
I have five characters in Productivitism. Not because I designed it that way from the start, but because that’s how many versions of myself I was actually trying to run in parallel.
Keyyard the Dev. This one codes mostly for Official Minecraft Partner projects like the Cut The Rope x Minecraft. And also for software engineering as well. Pretty busy Keyyard.
Keyyard the Entrepreneur. The entrepreneuer role finds strategies, answering questions like how to I make money from my own ideas, how do I enhance my inflow, etc.
Keyyard the Marketer. This one writes, posts, does SEO and ASO, does graphical design as well. This one can uses pretty much of the creativity and storytelling skill - likely opposite of the Dev (not really, but I will talk about this in another post)
Studious tmh. This one is learning IELTS, doing university research, trying to have something academic to look back on. tbh I aint an academic guy, but because I’m a self-learner and I wanted to prove to myself I could do whatever there is haha.
Healthy tmh. This one just wants to walk every day, take creatine, eat enough protein, not collapse from sitting at a desk for 12 hours.
Five roles. All real.
The problem wasn’t having too much to do
Before I built this, I thought my problem was volume. Too many tasks. Too many projects. If I could just finish things faster, I’d be fine.
But that wasn’t it.
The real problem was that each of these roles requires a completely different headspace. The way a developer thinks is not the way a marketer thinks. The entrepreneur has to zoom out and question everything. The student has to slow down and absorb. Healthy me just has to show up and move.
When all of those lived in the same list, I didn’t just feel busy. I felt fragmented. Like I had to become a different person every time I switched tasks, and there was no map for when to do the switching.
The result was the worst kind of paralysis, not the kind where you have nothing to do, but the kind where you have everything to do and can’t start any of it.
Where the idea came from
Two books cracked it open for me.
The first was Atomic Habits by James Clear — specifically the part about identity-based habits. The idea that you don’t build habits by setting goals, you build them by deciding what kind of person you want to be. “I want to exercise” is a goal. “I am an athlete” is an identity.
That reframe hit hard. Because I already had multiple identities. I just hadn’t given them separate space.
The second was How to Calm Your Mind by Chris Bailey — about finding productivity in anxious times. Bailey talks about how anxiety often comes from cognitive overload, from carrying too many open loops in your head at once. The fix isn’t to do more. It’s to close the loops you’re not working on right now.
Both books pointed at the same thing: clarity comes from separation, not from cramming everything together and trying to manage it all at once.
What actually changed
When I split my life into characters, something shifted that I didn’t expect.
I stopped feeling guilty about the roles I wasn’t playing today.
If I spent a full day as Keyyard the Dev, I didn’t feel bad about not studying IELTS. The Studious character was just waiting. Its habits, its quests, its progress, its all still there, ready for when I come back to it.
And because each character only shows its own things, the list is always small. When I open Keyyard the Dev, I see dev habits and dev tasks. Nothing else. My brain doesn’t have to filter out the noise, or there is no noise anymore. Each role becomes a short, focused list instead of a fragment of one overwhelming one.
And the thing I notice most now is how clearly I can see imbalance.
I can open my analytics and see: this week I was mostly a developer. Last week I spent more time on marketing than usual. Healthy tmh has been active every day this month, which means the walking habit is actually sticking.
That data didn’t exist before. It was all noise. Now it’s legible.
And the more I track, the more I want to track! not because I’m obsessed with metrics, but because every data point is actually a data point about myself. Who I spent my time being. Whether the person I’m tracking matches the person I want to be.
The title is wrong, actually
I said five versions. But that’s not quite right.
It’s not five versions of me. It’s one person with five active roles — and for the first time, each of them has enough room to breathe.
If you’re juggling more than one identity right now (and if you’re building something, learning something, and trying to stay human at the same time, you probably are), the problem might not be your discipline. It might just be that you’ve been trying to run five operating systems on one screen.
Productivitism is free on iOS. Start with the one role you most want to develop right now. The others can wait their turn.
Next in this series: What Is Multi-Character Architecture? — the design thinking behind why the separation works.