Burners

I built an app on four spheres: body, work, people, meaning. In the evening you tap a sphere’s knob and log how much energy went into it.

The app gives no scores. When a week tilts, it prints a sticker that says “work took 6 of 10” and offers to mark the sphere running cold.

I brought the practice back from a retreat: in the evening, name the one sphere of life that asks for attention and investment.

Time trackers count hours. By the evening nobody remembers the hours, and an hour of work and an hour with a child still sit in the table as identical rectangles.

A person sees a share faster than a number: work took six, body two, people two, meaning zero. So the unit here is a point: you hand out as many as the day felt. The instrument shows shares in tenths: “work took 6 of 10” means work took six tenths of the week. It reads your usual day from your own days.

I took the grid from the balance model in positive psychotherapy, Peseschkian, 1977: body, work, people, meaning. I borrowed only the grid. There is no therapy in the app.

An activity lands in one of the four. A doubtful case goes where you felt you were more, or splits in half. The instrument counts points, the activity stays out of it.

The casing works as a stove: a dark dock at the bottom carrying four knobs. A tap adds a point, a hold takes one back. Logging takes seconds.

A strip of the week runs above the spheres. A tap on a past day opens it, and a missed day can be filled in.

Week and month show the same data as a matrix. A row stands for a sphere, a column for a day or a week.

The instrument speaks in stickers: “work took 6 of 10”, “people running cold”, “even week”. The verbs in the vocabulary observe and do not judge. “Bad”, “should” and “your balance is off” are banned from the vocabulary.

I banned praise alongside blame. An even week is no achievement, so on it the instrument prints “even week”.

Burners grew out of my own practice; I checked it against the market later. The questions were the same for each: what others log, with what gesture, when and what they show back. I went through 53 screens and 16 sources.

Nine of eleven log how you feel. None logs how much energy went into each sphere.

Before the app I kept that rule on paper: I split a sheet into four and drew dashes in them.

I wanted the same thing at hand every evening, so I built the first version in a day.