When I moved to the planning office, the first big job that landed on me was counting.

For years I had watched other people do it from the sidelines. I knew it was painful. I knew someone suffered through it every quarter. But it wasn’t mine. Now it was. And the moment a problem becomes yours, you stop seeing it as background noise. You start seeing every wasted minute up close.

A count of 48,000

The hospital where I work runs a daily gratitude practice. Every staff member writes a short note about something they were thankful for that day. It’s a good idea. Nothing wrong with the idea.

The problem was that we had to count it.

Every quarter we tallied who wrote how much. About 48,000 posts piled up in a single quarter. And it wasn’t just adding up a number. A person had to read each entry and confirm who wrote it, on which day, in the right form.

The posts went up on Daum Cafe, a Korean community board, because we had no system of our own. So people posted however they liked. Different titles. Different formats. Different nicknames. Half the time you couldn’t tell if two posts came from the same person. Before you could count anything, you had to match names to people. We burned ourselves out just figuring out who was who, before the counting even started.

Three of us in the planning office spent a full week on it. Alone, it would have been three weeks. And that was only the final pass. Before us, each department’s clerk counted their own people first. Add up everyone who counted and everyone who checked, and twenty to thirty people were tied up in this every quarter.

What you saw was a few stacks of paper on a desk. What was actually happening was the whole hospital repeating the same work by hand, four times a year.

It wasn’t just the count

The deeper I looked, the more I realized the count was a symptom.

We had no shared system at all. Announcements went out on Band, a Korean group app. Department chatter happened on KakaoTalk, our messaging app. The gratitude posts piled up on Daum Cafe. Whenever we needed something, we grabbed whatever consumer app was handy.

For staff, this was miserable in a quiet way. KakaoTalk is where your friends and family live. It’s personal. And work orders kept arriving there. You’d be lying in bed at night and a department group chat would buzz. Work and private life had bled into each other.

Both halves bothered me. I wanted the count to disappear. And I wanted to pull all the scattered pieces into one place, so that a person’s private life and their job could finally be clean and separate.

The plan formed in my head

The fix was clearer than I expected.

If every staff member had a fixed name in the system, and posts had a fixed title and format, then the moment someone wrote one, it would be logged correctly. The counting would simply vanish. The number you saw would be the fact. No tallying, because there was nothing left to tally.

The scattered apps were the same shape of problem. Give every kind of message one home — announcements, chat, posts — and work would stop leaking into people’s personal phones.

In my head, the whole thing was already drawn.

The biggest thing I had built

So I decided to build it.

Honestly, I’d started before the job was even handed to me. Back in mid-March, while I was still working in the therapy room, I had quietly begun building this intranet. I’d been watching these problems for a long time, itching to fix them. When the count became my responsibility, I just pushed harder.

This was a different scale from anything I’d done. Everything before had been a small tool that helped with one task. This had to replace whole apps — announcements, messaging, the gratitude posts, department boards, all the scattered places at once, folded into a single hub.

I poured everything I’d learned into it. I put it on a NAS, the little server box in our office. I opened a path so it could be reached from outside. And night after night, with Claude beside me, I stacked it up one piece at a time.

If you take one thing from this, take this: you don’t need to know how to build the big thing on day one. You need a problem clear enough that the shape of the solution is obvious — then you build toward that shape, one small piece at a time.

I named it EasyONE. The scattered things, pulled into one. I’d been slapping “Easy” on my tools for a while, the wish that things could be simpler. This time I added “One.”

The launch

On April 14th, I opened EasyONE to the staff.

It was a trial run at first. I was still nervous. Everything I’d made before was used by one person, or one department. This was different. This was a screen every employee in the hospital would open every day. It was the first time I was putting something I’d built by hand in front of 660 people.

And I was proud. A man who hadn’t known what code was had built a system for an entire hospital and was handing it over. A solid month of work. I had the confidence that month bought me. I thought I’d prepared everything. Now the staff just had to use it.

That’s what I believed, right up until that afternoon.

Then the afternoon came. But that’s the next story.