Streaks
Streaks that measure the habit, not your attendance
Most streak counters measure one thing: whether you have failed to break a chain. That is a measure of attendance, and it stops describing your habits the moment life is anything other than uniform.
A day counts at 60% of its expected load
You do not have to complete everything to have had a day that counted. Clearing 60% of what was actually scheduled is enough for the day to count towards a streak.
The reasoning is that the all-or-nothing rule punishes exactly the days worth protecting. Someone who did four of their six habits on a hard day has done well, and telling them they scored zero teaches them that a partial day is worthless — which is the belief that ends habits, not the missed day itself.
Frequency is respected rather than flattened
A habit due four days a week contributes four sevenths of a day, not one whole day. Its expected load is four days, and it is scored against four days.
This sounds like arithmetic and is really a fairness rule. Under the usual model, a habit you deliberately scheduled for weekdays reads as a habit you fail every weekend, so the counter punishes you for the schedule you chose on purpose. Weighting by expected load means a four-day-a-week habit done four days a week is a perfect week, because it is one.
Today cannot break a run
A day that is merely still in progress is not a failure. Until the day is over, an incomplete today never breaks a streak.
It is a small rule that removes a specific and pointless kind of pressure: opening the app at two in the afternoon and being told, accurately but uselessly, that you have not yet done the thing you were always going to do that evening.
What a streak is for
A streak here is a description, not a score to defend. It is one signal among several, and it is deliberately not the thing the interface shouts about — there is no streak-loss guilt, no red badge and no notification you did not ask for.
The question worth answering is not whether the chain is unbroken. It is whether the habit is doing anything, and that is what the correlations are for.
At a glance
- Day counts at
- 60% of expected load
- Partial-week habits
- Scored against their own frequency
- In-progress today
- Never breaks a run
- Streak-loss notifications
- None
Common questions
- What happens to my streak if I miss a day?
- It bends rather than resetting to zero. A day still counts when you reach 60% of its expected load, so a light day inside an otherwise consistent month does not end the run. A single missed day is not evidence that a habit has collapsed, and the best-known study on habit formation found that one lapse did not measurably affect the automaticity trajectory.
- Does a habit I only do three times a week break the streak?
- No. Partial-week habits are scored against their own frequency, not against a daily target. A three-times-a-week habit done three times that week is a complete week, and the days in between are not misses.
- Will today's incomplete habits break my run?
- Never. An in-progress today cannot break a streak — the day is only judged once it is over. A counter that marks you down at nine in the morning for something you intend to do at seven in the evening is measuring the clock rather than the behaviour.
- Does Crescendo send notifications about losing a streak?
- None at all. Streak-loss notifications work by manufacturing anxiety about a number, which serves engagement metrics rather than the person receiving them, and the streak was never the habit in the first place.