There's a specific kind of night: you lie down having finished half your list, and the only thing your brain replays is the half you didn't. Strange accounting — on days I attempted nothing, zero brought no guilt. Only the days I tried earned me a beating.
I eventually noticed the collapse never came from difficulty. It came right after missing once. Skip one gym day, quit for six months. Break a diet at lunch, write off the day. Psychologists call it all-or-nothing thinking: facing a broken streak hurts more than deleting the whole attempt, so the brain deletes the attempt.
Then I looked at my todo app and realized it was an all-or-nothing machine. Streak counters. Completion percentages. Red "incomplete" markers waiting for me after a week away. Every instrument measured how much I failed, and fired loudest exactly when I was most likely to leave.
So I built the opposite, and these were the actual design decisions:
1. No color for "incomplete" in the calendar
