TinyPact
TinyPact 1.0: the floor you hold every week
Our first mini app is out. It counts no streaks, sends no 9am nudge, and refuses to call a hard week a failure. Here is what we built, and what we took out.
The idea for TinyPact arrived the way most useful ideas do — as an irritation.
One of us had been running a habit tracker for four months. A long green wall of kept promises. Then came a stomach bug in a hotel in the wrong time zone, three missed days, and the app did what those apps do: it set the number back to zero and offered a small grey face.
Nothing about that week had actually been a failure. The important work still went out. But the record said otherwise, and the honest response to a record that lies about you is to stop keeping it. We deleted the app, and then spent an embarrassing number of evenings arguing about why we had ever trusted it.
That argument is TinyPact. It shipped as 1.0 last month, for iPhone, iPad, and Mac.
A floor, not a ceiling
A ceiling is your best week. Three hours of writing a day, five workouts, inbox at zero. Ceilings are fun to plan and impossible to promise.
A floor is the other number — the minimum you will honour when the week is hostile. Not because you are motivated. Because you decided, once, when you were thinking clearly.
Every design decision in TinyPact falls out of that one distinction.
You name up to three Chapters: the arenas you are actually committed to. Health. Craft. Career. Whatever yours are. For each one you set a baseline in the unit that fits it — a count (five workouts), a duration (240 minutes of deep work), or a milestone you either reached or didn’t.
Three is a limit, not a suggestion. We tried five in an early build and watched the whole thing turn back into a to-do list.
Each day you log what happened, and the app tells you where the week stands: Advanced, Partial, or Drift.
Drift is a word we went back and forth on for weeks. Every alternative we tried — missed, behind, incomplete — carried a small accusation. Drift doesn’t. A boat drifts because of a current, and the useful question about a current is which way it is running, not whose fault it is. The app asks what happened, never why not.
Sunday, five minutes
The centre of TinyPact is not the daily log. It’s the weekly close.
Every Sunday the app offers Calibration: a short ritual that seals the week, shows you the pattern you were too close to notice, and lets you set one intention for the week ahead.
It shows what you finished, names the chapter that drifted most, and asks one question: What did this week teach you? The reflection is optional. Most weeks we skip it. The weeks we don’t turn out to be the ones worth rereading in December.
Then the week seals, and this is the part people either love or find slightly unnerving: a sealed week cannot be edited. Not by you, not by a settings toggle, not by us.
The other half of that rule is more generous than it sounds. At midnight on Sunday the slate clears completely. There is no debt carried into Monday, no chain to protect, no compounding guilt from a rough February. You never owe last week anything. You just start the next one.
Drift is data, not failure. Each week stands alone.
The part that only works if you wait
Most of what TinyPact does is invisible in the first month. It’s a record-keeping app, and records need time before they say anything.
At the end of a month it asks about stability — how much of each floor you held, and whether the chapter is expanding, holding, or contracting. Then it asks you to finish a sentence: I am becoming someone who…
At the end of a quarter it draws the season: thirteen weeks across every chapter, colour-coded, with no commentary at all.
Eight advanced, two partial, zero drift. That’s not a score, and the app never grades it. It’s a photograph of a season. Some of ours are much greyer than this one, and looking at a grey quarter honestly turns out to be more useful than any streak we ever protected.
And once a year there’s the Ledger Ceremony — a full accounting that asks for one sentence per chapter about what the year taught you. It’s the feature we’re proudest of and the one nobody has completed yet, because the app is younger than a year. Ask us again in January.
An export that assumes you have an AI
Every summary TinyPact produces — weekly, monthly, quarterly, yearly — exports as structured Markdown, with your life goal and chapter purposes included in the text.
That last part matters. Consistency data on its own can only tell you whether you showed up. Consistency data plus the reason you set the floor in the first place can be pasted into any AI with a question no tracker has ever been able to answer:
Am I actually moving toward what I said mattered?
We did not build a coach into the app. There is already a very good one on your other screen, and it does not need to live inside a weekly ritual to be useful.
What we deliberately left out
The list of what 1.0 does not do is shorter than the feature list, and we think it’s the more honest description of the product:
- No streaks, and no counter that resets
- No daily notifications telling you to hustle
- No badges, confetti, points, or leaderboards
- No social feed, no friends, no sharing your floor with anyone
- No subscription
TinyPact syncs across your devices through iCloud, so the record follows you without an account, a password, or a server of ours holding your life in a table. It’s free to start. The full product — complete history, every review, the Ledger Ceremony, the exports — unlocks with a single one-time purchase of $4.99. There’s a $9.99 option that covers TinyPact and every other HourLife mini app, now and later. (HourLife itself, the main app, isn’t part of that bundle — we’d rather say so here than have you find out at the till.)
What’s next
1.0 is deliberately small, and the roadmap is mostly about resisting the urge to make it bigger. We’re watching three things: how the Ledger Ceremony lands in December, whether three chapters is the right ceiling for people who are not us, and how the exports get used once there’s a full year of weeks behind them.
If you already know what matters and you’re tired of software that punishes you for being a person, it’s on the App Store now.
Your floor. Your record. One price.