Your life, played like a basketball season
You pick the parts of your life that matter: a person, a project, your health. You give each one a few small actions you can actually do. You tap one when you do it.
Then, when a season ends, a sports broadcast desk takes your fortnight, reads it like a game, and tells you what it saw. You don't need a perfect day. You need about 40% of one.
7 plays makes the day. Every day gives you 16 shots. Take 7 and you're over 40%. That wins the day. Nobody shoots 100% here, and you were never supposed to.
Why it exists
Most trackers are built for people who finish things
Perfect weeks. Unbroken streaks. A grid of green squares that only means anything if you did everything.
That design has a failure mode, and it's a brutal one: the moment you miss, the tool turns on you. The streak breaks. The chart goes grey. The app you downloaded to help now keeps a permanent record of your worst fortnight and shows it to you every single time you open it.
If you're burnt out, or running an ADHD brain, or just living a life with more moving parts than hours, that isn't motivation. It's a daily reminder that you're behind — and the usual response to that reminder is to stop opening the app.
The 40% League starts from the opposite assumption. It takes it as given that you will miss days, that most days are partial, and that a partial day is the normal case rather than the failure case. Then it does the thing almost no tracker does: it calls that day a win, out loud, in the voice of somebody who is genuinely pleased for you.
The one idea
Why 40% is a good number
In real basketball, a player who makes 40% of their shots is good. Not scraping by. Professionally, respectably good.
Think about what that means. The best players who ever lived missed most of the shots they took. They are still the best players who ever lived. Greatness in that sport was never about hitting everything; it was about taking the shot, night after night, for years.
So the league borrows the number. A day here holds 16 shots, about one for every waking hour. Take 7 and that's a made day: not a partial success, not "44% of a proper day". A made day.
You don't need all 16. You never needed all 16.
How it works
Three moving parts, and that's the lot
Nothing here needs setting up twice, and nothing needs you to know anything about basketball.
Draft your players
A player is a part of your life you want to keep an eye on. A person, a project, an area: your work, your sleep, your closest friend, one client who can't slip. You name them yourself, in your own words. Your list of players is your roster. Three to eight works best.
Give them plays
A play is one small, repeatable thing you can actually finish: a 20-minute walk, call Mum back, an hour of focused work. Each one scores a stat and is worth 1, 2 or 3. Keep some easy ones. Easy shots are how anyone gets to 40%.
Tap a play when you run it
That's the whole game. One tap, after you've done the thing. There's no planning layer, no schedule to keep up with, nothing to fall behind on. Seven in a day and the day is made.
The three stats
Only one of them is productivity
This is the part that quietly does the most. Every play scores exactly one of three stats. The split is deliberate, because a life is not a to-do list.
Work and progress. Anything that moves your life along: a task finished, a bill paid, a project shoved another foot down the road.
- Plan tomorrow's top three
- Reply to the five emails
- An hour of focused work
Sleep, food, movement, rest. The unglamorous maintenance that keeps you standing, and the first thing to vanish in a bad month.
- Eat a proper breakfast
- A 20-minute walk
- Read instead of scrolling
Other people. Time with them, help given, showing up. Scored at the same weight as work, on purpose.
- Ten minutes one-on-one
- Call a friend back
- Cover for a colleague
Each play is also worth 1, 2 or 3 : small act, solid one, or something genuinely hard. And the value is for effort, not results. A difficult conversation counts even if it went badly. Especially if it went badly.
A worked example
An ordinary Tuesday, scored
Nothing heroic happened here. Seven taps across a normal day, and the day is made with room to spare.
BodyREB 2
The KidsAST 2
WorkPTS 1
WorkPTS 3
BodyREB 1
The KidsAST 2
MindREB 1
Seven plays out of a possible sixteen is 44% from the field. Note what the box score says about the day: it was not a work day, it was a balanced one. On a tracker that only counted output, this Tuesday would have scored two things and looked like a bad day.
The explainer from the top of the page, if you skipped it: Dave, Ray and Jules walking a newcomer through all of the above — the 40%, the players, the plays, the season. Three and a half minutes.
Audio didn't load — the file sits beside
this page as desk-rulebook.mp3.
The payoff
And then the desk calls your season
Here's the part that isn't like other trackers. When a season ends, you send your log to the desk, and the hosts read your fortnight the way a sports panel reads a game. The top line. The story underneath it. The thing you hadn't noticed. For now every show is made by hand, so yours arrives as a link a day or two after the season ends.
Calls the numbers, straight, and owns the top of the show. He'll tell you what happened before anybody tells you what it meant, and he checks it twice before he says it.
Sees the effort behind the number: the unglamorous shift that held the week together. He's the one who says what a rough fortnight actually meant, and he usually closes the show.
Spots the pattern the scoreboard missed: the quiet connection that produced the headline. Joins the desk for the big shows, and only speaks when there's something real in the tape.
A season recap, start to finish — theme music, the desk's own welcome, the story of the fortnight and the sign-off. Just over a minute, and the transcript is underneath.
Audio didn't load — the episode sits
beside this page as sample-show.mp3.
DAVE Welcome back to the show. Season one is on the books, and it held its line the whole way. Thirteen games, fifty-two per cent. Eighty-five points, seventy rebounds, fifty-six assists — two hundred and eleven in total.
Top storyRAY The school run. Twelve of thirteen games — ninety-two per cent of a season on one play. That isn't luck. That's a decision somebody made again every morning it counted.
JULES Three names on the card, all rookies, and the steadiest thing in the season is that one play. I won't claim it made the fifty-two. I'm saying the season had a spine, and we can name it.
DAVE I went looking for the one miss. Couldn't build a story out of it. There isn't one.
Sign-off · theme outRAY Eighty-five points is a fine season. Twelve school runs is a better one. That's the card — we'll see you at the draft.
That is the transcript of the clip above — same episode, produced by the same pipeline that makes a real one. Every number in it was checked against the log before it was spoken: the hosts are not permitted to invent a statistic, and the show refuses to air a line that doesn't trace back to something you logged.
What the desk will never do
They are not a cheerleading engine, and they're not a coach with a clipboard. There is a tone charter written into the system and it holds three lines: the desk can be wry about the schedule, the numbers and the roster — never about you. A day under the line is never called a loss. And nobody, at any point, gets a grade.
The other rule is subtler and matters more. They talk about your life in your words. If you named a player The Zoo, the desk says The Zoo — not "Family". There's no tidy master list of approved life categories that your actual life gets filed into. That was tried, and it killed the thing that made it feel like yours.
What it's actually for
Built for the days you don't have it in you
The basketball is the paint job. Underneath, this is a burnout-recovery tool, and most of the design decisions in it were made against one of four problems.
Brains that don't do "later"
Logging is one tap, and it happens after you do the thing. There's no planning layer to maintain and nothing to fall behind on. Your roster sits on the screen as an external memory for the parts of your life you'd otherwise forget you cared about. The fortnight puts a visible edge on time: a start, an end, a clean one after it. That helps if weeks otherwise blur together. And a missed day carries no penalty, so the shame spiral that ends most tracking attempts has nothing to grab onto.
It isn't treatment and it doesn't pretend to be. It's a tracker that stops punishing the symptoms.
Tracking without completionism
There is no 100% here to chase. The target is 40% and clearing it doesn't raise it. There are no streaks, because broken streaks demotivate. That's one of the better-replicated findings in the behaviour literature, and the app is built around it rather than in spite of it. Miss three days and nothing is lost. You took fewer shots that fortnight. That's the whole consequence.
All of your life, not just the billable part
Three stats, and only one of them is work. Rest scores. Your kids score. Calling a friend back scores, at the same weight as a finished task. The effect shows up in the box score: a fortnight where you were an excellent parent and a mediocre employee reads as a good fortnight, because it was one, and almost no other tool will tell you so.
Seeing where the ball isn't going
Group the same data by player instead of by stat and you get the diagnostic view: who's been getting minutes, and who hasn't. It's how you find out that the thing you'd have sworn was your top priority hasn't touched the ball in nine days. Nobody tells you off about it — a zero next to a name is information, not a judgment. It's usually the most useful screen in the app.
There's also an injury list. Genuinely ill, or genuinely out? Mark the day and it leaves your season averages entirely — it isn't a zero, it's a day you weren't playing. Rest is treated as coaching rather than as absence, and when the desk covers a week with days on that list, it drops the jokes and says so.
The loop
Two weeks, then you get your team back
Seasons are a fortnight long. They start on a Sunday and end on a Saturday, and the Sunday in between is the whole product in miniature.
The redraft is the mechanic that makes the whole thing survivable. Nothing you set up in week one is permanent, which means a bad roster is a two-week mistake instead of the reason you quit in March. Most people's first roster is wrong. It's supposed to be — that's what season one is for.
House rules
Things this app will not do to you
Every one of these is a decision someone had to argue for, and several of them cost features that would have been easy to build.
- ✕No streaks. Nothing here can be "broken", so nothing here can be ruined.
- ✕No leaderboards. Nothing compares you to another person. The only team you play is last season's you.
- ✕No grades, no verdicts, no score out of ten. The desk reports your season. It does not mark it.
- ✕No fixed list of life categories. You name your players and plays yourself. The show uses your words back at you.
- ✕No credit for outcomes you didn't control. Effort is what scores. The hard conversation counts even when it goes badly.
- ✕No jokes at your expense. The hosts can be dry about the fixture list. Never about the person on the card.
- ✕No invented numbers. Every stat the desk says traces back to something you logged, or it doesn't get said.
Straight answer
Where it's up to
What you can try today is a working prototype: one web page that runs in your browser and keeps your log on your own device. It is genuinely usable — people are logging real seasons on it — but it is not yet an app in a store, and it doesn't sync anywhere.
The show is real and running. Episodes are generated from actual exports, written by the desk, voiced by the hosts and mixed with the theme — which is what you're listening to further up this page. The visuals are the part still to come; the deliberate order of work was script first, then voice, then pictures, on the grounds that a beautiful studio narrating a boring episode is worth nothing.
Your log currently lives in your own browser's storage, on your own device. It isn't uploaded anywhere. You can make a backup whenever you like, and when a season ends you export your log and send it in for your show. Nothing leaves your phone unless you send it.
Two ways in
Draft a team. See what your fortnight sounds like.
It takes a minute to set up with a suggested team, everything you log is saved, and you can change any of it whenever you like.