Remember who you are.
Everyone knew me as productive. For a long time, I wasn't. This is how I closed that gap, and why I built Ritual.
Louis BaverstockFounder · EPP, Warwick · Final year
A label I was wearing, not one I'd earned.
Ask anyone who knew me and they'd have said I was busy. Always working on something, always a new idea.
What they didn't see were the days that disappeared, sometimes several in a row: the laptop stayed shut, emails went unanswered, deadlines slipped. The ideas went the same way. An online shop, an AI product, a web design agency, each started with everything I had and each dropped for a reason that, looking back, was really a way out.
The hardest part was what it did to how I saw myself. Being "the productive one" felt like a label I was wearing, not something I'd earned.
Remember who the f*** you are.
My brother, on the phoneThe turning point came during a rough period at university.
My sleep had slipped, my diet had slipped, I was going through a breakup, and I didn't feel like myself. My mental health was the worst it had ever been, and some days I didn't get out of bed.
Then my brother called. He didn't offer sympathy. He told me, in exactly those words, to remember who I was.
He was right. I'd spent my whole life becoming who I am, in the gym, in my studies, in the businesses I'd built and the values I hold, and I was letting one bad stretch decide how I lived. I got up that day and put everything I was feeling into something useful: a personal training business, and honest content to go with it. The message was the one he'd given me. Do things with conviction, or don't do them at all.
Work doesn't have to be your whole life.
Then came my placement year in M&A. Long days, and around them internship applications, a financial modelling qualification and a side project built on the train and at lunch. By the time I'd been to the gym and cooked, the day was gone. I was burning out.
What saved me was realising that work doesn't have to be your whole life. Use the evenings and weekends well and you can build a second life around your nine-to-five: a five-to-nine. But the tools I'd tried made planning feel like progress. I needed one place to put everything down, and something that made me follow it through.
A share price for my day.
So I built Ritual for myself. Everything I plan has a value. Only what I commit to today counts, and anything I leave unfinished costs me. It's play money, but watching a number rise or fall is enough to turn "I should" into "I did". And because my problem was never one bad day but the ones that followed it, there's one rule I don't break: never miss twice.
I've used it every day since around March. Even on my worst days, I still get something done. That wasn't true before.
If I put it down, it gets done. Everything I'm building towards is on the page in front of me.
I've always waited for the day I could share everything I've learnt. Ritual is part of that, and so are the guides: habits, mindset, business, money, and the practical side of study and careers.
I'm putting Ritual in front of people before it's perfect, which is exactly what I used to avoid. If you've got more plans than finished things, join the waitlist below. You'll hear first when places open, and you can always write to me at hello@getritual.app.
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Ritual is in beta. Join the waitlist to hear first when places open and when it's on the App Store, and get a founding price, lower than at launch.