What happens on a low-energy day?

Fewer tasks surfaced, softer nudges, one visible next step — not a full backlog lecture. The full list is one tap away if you want it.

Can I override the defaults?

Yes — every shift is a default, not a lock. The "show me more" tap is always one motion away on Today. Settings → Energy lets you customize the thresholds.

Does the app track my energy over time?

Only locally, for you to see if you want. We do not show graphs, run analytics for coaches, or use the data for anything other than sorting your own day.

What if I do not want to log energy at all?

You can disable the morning prompt entirely. Energy defaults to medium and stays there. You lose the adaptive defaults but gain the simpler experience. About a third of users run the app this way.

Is this just gentleness for its own sake?

No. It is measurable: ADHD users who use energy-aware filtering complete more weekly tasks than users who run a static list. The mechanism is decision fatigue avoidance, not encouragement. Less in equals more out, on the days that matter most.

Why "low energy" is not laziness

Energy-aware sorting is not a wellness gimmick. It is a filter on what we surface first.

Low energy is not laziness — KeptMind shrinks your list, delays non-critical nudges, and keeps one clear next step when you log a thin day.

What we mean by energy

When we say energy in KeptMind, we are not talking about caffeine or sleep score. We are talking about available executive function — the cognitive resource that lets you start a task, switch between tasks, and resist distractions. It varies hour to hour, day to day, and varies more for some brains than others. A neurotypical adult may have a steady seventy percent baseline; an ADHD adult may have anywhere between fifteen and ninety percent depending on sleep, hormones, medication, the weather, and reasons no one can name.

A productivity tool that ignores this variance is a tool designed for a brain that does not exist. The user is presumed to be the same person at 8 a.m. on Monday and at 4 p.m. on Thursday. They are not. The same task list that energizes them on Monday morning paralyzes them on Thursday afternoon, and the difference is not motivation. It is biology.

The variance is not random, but it is not fully predictable either. ADHD medication cycles create a rough daily arc — higher function during peak hours, a crash in the afternoon for many users. Menstrual cycles create a monthly arc that affects executive function measurably. Seasonal light changes, sleep debt, social stress, and even barometric pressure shifts all contribute. No single input predicts the day reliably, which is why we ask rather than infer. The morning energy check-in takes two seconds and gives us ground truth that no algorithm could match. The user knows how they feel; we just need to ask and then act on the answer.

What makes this particularly important for ADHD is the gap between intention and capacity. On a low-energy day, the ADHD brain often retains full awareness of what needs to be done — the problem is not forgetting, it is initiating. Showing the full list on such a day does not inform the user of anything they do not already know. It simply adds visual evidence of the gap between what they should do and what they can do. That evidence is experienced as shame, and shame is the single most reliable predictor of app abandonment in our data.

What changes when you log low energy

When you log "meh" or "bad," KeptMind shrinks the list, delays non-critical nudges, and keeps one clear next step visible. The full list still exists. You can always tap to see it. We are choosing the default, not hiding the data.

Specifically: on a low-energy day the Today view collapses to one item, with two more available behind a "show me more" tap. Non-critical push reminders for the rest of the day shift forward by twelve hours or to the next morning, depending on context. SMS escalation tightens its silence interval — if a critical item is missed, we wait longer before stepping up, because intrusion costs more on bad days. The "draft my week" feature, which auto-schedules a flexible plan, defaults to fewer items per day for the next forty-eight hours.

None of this is locked. You can override every setting. But you do not have to remember to override it. The defaults shift to match the day.

The goal: momentum without overwhelm

The goal is momentum without overwhelm — especially for ADHD brains that already pay a planning tax.

There is a counterintuitive finding from people with ADHD who switch to energy-aware planning: their total weekly task completion goes up, not down. The mechanism is straightforward. A bad-day list with one item leads to one item completed. A bad-day list with twenty items leads to zero items completed plus a wave of shame. One is more than zero. Over a month, the math is not subtle — energy-aware filtering produces meaningfully more output despite asking for less.

This generalizes beyond ADHD. Anyone who has been in burnout recovery, parenting a small child, or going through a difficult life transition has seen the pattern. The will to do everything is not the issue. The issue is that the visible list of everything functions as evidence against you on the days you cannot. Removing the evidence is the design move.

Where the design came from

The insight came from watching how people actually used the app during testing. On low-energy days, the full list did not motivate — it paralyzed. People closed the app and felt worse. A shorter list with one visible action had a completely different effect.

We were not the first to notice this. Therapists working with ADHD clients have been telling them to "just pick one thing" for decades. The cognitive science backs this up. Decision fatigue is real, and it is the steepest at the moments executive function is already low. Asking the user to pick one thing themselves on a bad day is asking too much. The tool can do that picking for them.

The picking algorithm is deliberately simple. On a bad-energy day, we surface the task with the highest criticality flag and the lowest estimated energy cost. If no task is flagged critical, we surface the one with the nearest deadline that can still be completed in under fifteen minutes. The logic is not sophisticated because it does not need to be — the value is not in choosing the optimal task, it is in choosing any task and removing the paralysis of choice. A slightly suboptimal pick that the user actually does is infinitely better than a perfect pick the user stares at while frozen.

We also removed the streak counter. Streaks are motivating until a bad day breaks one, at which point the tool becomes evidence of failure. A daily energy check-in has no streak to break. You can log "bad" for two weeks straight; nothing breaks; the data is just data, not a verdict.

What about high-energy days?

On a "good" energy log, the Today view expands. We surface more items, including longer-horizon work that was hidden on previous days. The "draft my week" feature schedules denser. We assume you have the resource to handle a fuller plate, and we get out of the way.

This is the symmetric counterpart of low-energy filtering. We are not always asking less. We are matching the day. On a great Tuesday morning the user is treated as the high-functioning person they are; on a thin Thursday they are treated as the human they also are. Same person, different day, different default.

High-energy days also unlock what we call "momentum tasks" — items that have been deferred multiple times and need a burst of executive function to start. These tasks are invisible on meh and bad days because surfacing them would only add to the paralysis. But on a good day, the user has the cognitive surplus to tackle the thing they have been avoiding. The system surfaces one momentum task alongside the regular list, framed as an opportunity rather than an obligation: "You have energy today — want to tackle the insurance form you have been deferring?" The framing matters. It is an invitation, not a guilt trip. About 60% of momentum tasks surfaced on good-energy days get completed that same day.

A note on guilt

A productive design philosophy here is to refuse to make the user feel watched. We do not show the user a "you logged low energy on five of the last seven days" stat. We do not show the energy log to anyone but the user. We do not use it to predict productivity, score the user against benchmarks, or build a graph for a coach to look at.

The energy log exists because the app needs the input, not because the user needs the output. The user logs "bad" and the app behaves differently. That is the contract. The data does not become content.

If this article was useful, these related guides cover adjacent ground and are worth reading next:

Each of the linked articles approaches the topic from a slightly different angle, and reading two or three of them together usually produces a more complete picture than any single article can. The shared underlying neurology means that improvements in one area often unlock progress in others, which is why the topics interconnect even when they appear separate at first glance.

"Momentum without overwhelm."

Frequently asked questions

What happens on a low-energy day?: Fewer tasks surfaced, softer nudges, one visible next step — not a full backlog lecture. The full list is one tap away if you want it.
Can I override the defaults?: Yes — every shift is a default, not a lock. The "show me more" tap is always one motion away on Today. Settings → Energy lets you customize the thresholds.
Does the app track my energy over time?: Only locally, for you to see if you want. We do not show graphs, run analytics for coaches, or use the data for anything other than sorting your own day.
What if I do not want to log energy at all?: You can disable the morning prompt entirely. Energy defaults to medium and stays there. You lose the adaptive defaults but gain the simpler experience. About a third of users run the app this way.
Is this just gentleness for its own sake?: No. It is measurable: ADHD users who use energy-aware filtering complete more weekly tasks than users who run a static list. The mechanism is decision fatigue avoidance, not encouragement. Less in equals more out, on the days that matter most.