Every productivity tool eventually grows a streak counter. It is cheap to build, it demonstrably increases how often people open an app, and users ask for it by name. We are not building one, and the reasoning is worth writing down because it explains most of the other decisions here too.
What a streak actually measures
A streak counts consecutive days. That sounds like a measure of progress, but read it again: it is a measure of not having stopped. Those are different things, and the difference matters enormously for someone working alone.
Consider two months. In the first you shipped four significant things and took eleven days off. In the second you opened the app daily, ticked something small each time, and finished nothing that mattered. The streak counter prefers the second month. Anyone honest about their own work prefers the first.
The part that does the damage
The real problem is not the counting. It is what happens when the number breaks.
A streak converts a gap into a loss. Miss a Tuesday and you have not simply had a Tuesday off, you have destroyed something you built. And the research on this is not subtle: once a streak breaks, the behaviour it was supporting frequently collapses entirely. The person who missed one day does not miss one day. They stop.
Now think about who is most likely to break a streak in a tool like this one. It is the person who had a terrible week. Who got ill. Whose client blew up. Who was, in short, having exactly the kind of stretch where a tool that helps you decide what to do next would be most useful. A streak counter meets that person at the door with evidence of their failure.
That is a product actively working against the person it was built for.
What replaced it
The number on the progress page is lifetime work shipped, and it only goes up. There is no calendar of red squares, no week-over-week comparison, no chart with a downward slope in it.
Take three weeks off and it sits exactly where you left it. Come back and the next thing you finish makes it larger. The number cannot express disappointment because it has no mechanism for going down.
This is not softness. It is a bet that an accurate record of what you have actually built is more motivating over years than a fragile counter of consecutive days, and that the moment you return after a bad stretch is the moment a tool most needs to be on your side.
The general rule
Anything in this product that could be read as a scoreboard of failure is not built. No overdue counts, no completion percentages, no red anything. When something has gone quiet the product says so plainly, once, and offers you a way forward rather than a tally of the silence.
If you find something here that makes you feel watched or judged, that is a bug. Tell us and we will remove it.