⚛ The Big Bang

Hi!! My name is Luna and I am the CEO of Rikagaku, the company behind Maya. I will explain and tell you the story of this application, as well as the reasons for its existence and what our goals are for the future. If you are deciding whether to subscribe to it, this text will be of great help.

While you should expect an application that helps you organize your tasks, you can expect to have extreme control over them. It doesn’t matter if you do simple things or manage three companies, the goal is for your brain to always be free to do what it does best. You will not only have incredible tools to manage your life, but you will also have a guide on how to live it in the best way possible, thanks to the knowledge of thousands of years. Maya will be in continuous improvement. Just like you.

The beginning

I have had problems with productivity for a long time. I was born into a very chaotic and disorganized environment, and this ended up causing me to develop misconceptions, such as “I can’t do anything I want”, “I have big dreams, but I’ll never achieve them because I always take longer than others” and even “Why am I so inefficient and other people aren’t?”. Obviously, none of this was exactly my fault, because I lacked knowledge and habits. Seriously, I didn’t even eat properly. My sleep was a mess, and I got to the point where I would drink more than 1 liter of coffee a day to try to get something done. Well, it never worked.

In 2020, my journey to try to change this began. Due to the Covid-19 pandemic, I stayed home for a long time and had direct contact with YouTube. There, I discovered things that I still love today, like Physics and programming — which I thought I would only learn in college. I’ve even tried using things like the Pomodoro method and some ridiculous hacks that most people try to get a huge boost in productivity. Needless to say, none of these things work on their own. I learned that no coach who sells a magic, quick formula really has anything to teach you. At the end of that same year, I discovered a way to learn programming on my own, and from then on, things gradually changed. But it was no use knowing where to start while I stopped and started learning again every month. This lasted until the end of 2022, when I received the key knowledge to solve my problem: using lists. Obviously, I didn’t use just any TXT. I looked for apps out there to have something that was integrable and highly manipulable. I tried several, like Google Tasks, some calendars, and other apps that I didn’t adapt to at all. They all had something in common that I always hated: they were a limited box. There’s no point in having a giant list of what to do today if you don’t have a history, because your progress is not tangible and you can’t visualize the future and the past in an analytical and orderly way. That’s when I discovered SuperProductivity. This app stayed with me for a long time, and thanks to the fact that it has graphs and logs, I started to think of my goals as tasks. Every task has a record, and I can track it according to my needs. That’s when I started to see my actions and see how inefficient they were. However, something essential was still missing:

Even with a productivity app, I didn’t know what productivity was.

It’s useless to have a tool if you don’t know how to use it. Have you ever seen someone who bought all the materials an engineer uses and then suddenly started designing houses like someone who studied this for years in college? Obviously not. It’s no different with productivity. The biggest mistake made by those who try to be productive is to believe in the false premise that all it takes is motivation. That all it takes is to try hard and keep banging your head against the wall. No, knowledge is power, and without it you’re nothing.

And that’s what I was doing: nothing. I still wasn’t eating right, wasn’t exercising, I was still sleeping 4 hours a day, and there were even days when I went to school without any sleep at all. And when did that change?

But How About You?

Know thyself.

You, me and all people can be summed up in one concept: we are brains in flesh and blood armor. Knowing yourself is not just knowing who you are to the world, what you like and what you want to do in the future. It is knowing the complexity of what makes you up. And that is what I did. In 2023, I came into contact with Neuroscience, I became aware of how my brain works and the reasons for each of my mistakes. I learned that productivity is not about producing more, but rather producing with quality while you enjoy life. And most importantly of all, I understood the power of habit.

The most impressive human feats are, in reality, the aggregate of innumerable isolated elements and each of which, in a certain sense, is nothing extraordinary. ~Dan Chambliss

High-performance people do not neglect sleep. If they do, they are paying a high price that will quickly become unproductive. Those who ignore physical exercise will have to make 10x more effort than those who do not ignore it, and will also pay the price of aging badly, in addition to living less. The same goes for those who ignore their diet. Have you ever tried to deliver less than what a machine needs and expected it to work the same way? Why would it be any different with our bodies?

It simply isn’t. With this extreme change in perspective, my way of seeing tasks also changed. I understood that everything I did was relevant. Don’t get me wrong, not everything we do is really important, but nothing can be ignored. Loose or ignored parts come back one day and destroy a castle. Thinking like this, why not consider everything a task? That’s what I did. I treated eating as a task, sleeping as a task, socializing as a task — after all, this is one of the things we cannot ignore. If you focus too much on time with others, you forget about time for yourself. If you focus too much on your own time, you forget about spending time with others. Both are important, so you should be aware of how much you do with each one.

Obviously, this has created a problem. SuperProductivity was probably not designed with this in mind. A large number of tasks (I had approximately 40 per day) made it impossible to manage everything, and this is extremely wrong. You should not spend your brain thinking about tasks, but rather while executing them. Our brain is made to connect ideas and create new things, not to manage large amounts of data. This way of managing things started to weigh me down and become exhausting. Until I discovered TaskWarrior, an application that is more in the programmer niche than in the productivity niche, since it is used in a terminal (CLI), so you have to have knowledge of Bash and other things. Understanding it was simple for me, but each operation I did in it was complicated and not at all intuitive, since it had no interface and I had to write commands to do each thing. Because of this, I started automating things with code, creating structures, types, and spent August 2023 to early 2024 doing everything in several bash scripts. Since I started learning Rust (a programming language) in early 2024, I used this project for that purpose, and that’s when fypm came about. Until early 2025, I thought about making it an open-source side project that I would produce on the side while I looked for freelance work or some remote job somewhere. However, a lot of things changed. My brother needed my help and didn’t know what to do, since he couldn’t continue with what he wanted and urgently needed to make money.

Rikagaku and Maya

That’s when I put the pieces together in my head. I didn’t want to make fypm an app just for devs forever; my goal was to create a beautiful interface and make it something big. I wanted to share my knowledge of neuroscience with the world and help people who were in a similar situation to me to improve their lives, just like what happened to me. But the reality is that projects made with love and only with love do not provide support. It is rare to find people who will contribute to the code or donate. I love open-source applications and believe in the cause, but the reality is much harder than it seems.

So that’s when he and I talked and decided to make a huge change to the project. We wrote code with the maximum of our productivity, reviewed concepts we had learned together about neuroscience and gradually began to form the business of it all. We formed Rikagaku (a company that aims to use computing to spread knowledge), changed the name of the project to Maya (it is a reference to the Mayan calendar) and began slowly forming something that will not only change our lives, but that will change the lives of many people.

And when I say that it will change the lives of many people, I am being extremely sincere. Knowledge is power, and as long as it is delivered in the right way, everything changes. Maya is not just a place for you to put your tasks. It is a tool, it is the bearer of a philosophy. And this philosophy is centered on knowledge. In the most sincere, pure and ancient knowledge.