01 — First run
No account. That is the whole signup.
The Spark opens on one screen and one promise. No email, no password,
no paywall, no trial with a date on it. The screen after it asks for a
code. The public build let you skip it, as shown; the build
participants downloaded required the code from their consent form,
and had no skip.
A code, not an account.
02 — Onboarding
Your words, kept the way you wrote them.
Three questions: who you are, what you want, and what a day actually
looks like. There are no dropdowns and no goal categories, because the
moment you pick lose weight off a list, the thing you actually
said is gone.
The third question is the one most apps skip. A plan built for
a life you do not have is a plan you will not keep — so
the 5:15 alarm and the drive-thru go in, and they become the
constraints your plan has to survive.
03 — The Game Plan
Five come back. You take three.
Each one is built out of something you actually said — the walk
is first because the stairs came up in your own words. Then the
ceiling: pick a third and the other two grey out.
Three, not thirty. You cannot talk your way into a fourth.
Committing is the only irreversible thing you do in the app, and it is
the one moment asking for notifications makes any sense. Asked once,
here.
04 — Standby
Evolutions begin on a Monday.
Finish setting up on a Tuesday and nothing starts. The app shows you
the plan and waits, because a seven-day cycle that begins on
day three is a five-day cycle wearing a costume, and the
whole method depends on the unit being whole.
Six days of nothing to do is an odd thing for an app to offer you. It
is also the first evidence that this one is not trying to be a habit
you have to keep in order to keep your habits.
05 — Monday to Friday
Three checkboxes and a box to write in.
This is the screen you see every weekday. Ticking is day-level, not
per-entry — did it happen today, yes or no. Past days stay
visible and sealed, because a week you edited afterwards is
not a record of anything.
Mid-week a note arrives, written against what you actually logged.
Not a streak, not a badge, not a nudge to open the app.
“Day 3 is where the walk gets skipped. Put your shoes
somewhere you’ll trip over them.”
In the study, notes like this were the variable: which participants got
a morning note was decided at random when they consented.
06 — Saturday
One open question. No sliders.
Nothing to log on Saturday. Your week is laid out, and the only thing
left is to say how it went — in your own words, at whatever
length you feel like. That goes up together with what you logged.
What comes back reads the week against what you wrote. It names the
Wednesday collision as a scheduling problem, not a discipline
problem, banks the habit that stopped needing your attention, and
refuses to call two-of-five a failure. The numbers are one tap away
and deliberately not the headline.
07 — Sunday
Next week is built out of last week.
This is the hinge the whole method turns on. Your three come back
pre-selected, with new options mixed in that exist because of
what you wrote yesterday — the Wednesday walk, rescheduled to
lunch on Wednesdays only.
Keep, swap, or add. Still never more than three.
08 — Six weeks later
Six weeks of your own writing, read back as one story.
Then it repeats. Plan Sunday, log Monday to Friday, review Saturday,
replan Sunday. The last Saturday is the same screen with one word
changed, and a Look Back that spans everything instead of one week.
It ends on a Sunday because the length is measured in whole
Evolutions — no ragged final week. 33 of 42 days, and a closing
line that does not try to keep you.
