The app that knows your momentum

The Today view is not a filtered version of the task list. It’s a different kind of interface entirely — one that tries to answer a question most productivity apps don’t ask: not what needs to be done, but how you’re doing at doing things.

Three concepts

Drift measures whether you’re slipping on long-term goals. It looks at tasks across your Spaces and identifies patterns of avoidance — the category of work that keeps getting moved to tomorrow, the project whose overdue count has been growing for a week. Drift isn’t about individual tasks. It’s about whether your actual behaviour matches your stated priorities.

Momentum is recent completion velocity. How many tasks did you finish in the last seven days? Is that number trending up or down compared to the seven days before? Momentum doesn’t care whether the tasks were important — only whether you’re moving. It’s a signal, not a score.

Traces is the record of what actually happened. Not what was planned, not what’s still pending — what was done, when, in what order. The Supabase migration for this session added a traces table to persist this history. Traces is the raw material that both Drift and Momentum are computed from.

What the Today page actually shows

app/today/page.tsx is 533 lines. It renders your due-today tasks at the top, then a momentum bar, then drift signals by Space, then your traces for the last few days. The layout is intentionally dense — it’s a dashboard, not a task list.

lib/insights.ts grew from 181 lines to 359. The new calculations live there: the rolling 7-day completion count, the per-space overdue trend, the streak calculation that feeds the momentum display.

The Supabase migration — add_streak_and_traces.sql — adds a streak counter to the user profile and the traces table for storing completion events with timestamps and context.

Why this feature exists

The core problem with most task managers is that they are indifferent to whether you’re actually using them well. They show you tasks. They don’t tell you whether you’re making progress.

A task manager that only shows lists can have 200 tasks in it and you’ll feel productive for adding them. One that tracks momentum will notice when you’ve closed two tasks in seven days.

The Today view is the app’s attempt to be honest with you about your own behavior. Whether that’s useful depends on whether you want that honesty.

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Next: sharing Spaces with other people.