Sometimes, finding the right balance between flexibility and simplicity is hard. We have made many changes to our streak system during the last few months but we felt that we hadn’t found the perfect solution yet.

Streaks were still too hard to understand and we often received the feedback that people were confused when they lost their streak. That’s why we decided to continue working on them.

Weekdays 📅

Because some people work late or during the night we initially wanted to make our streak system as flexible as possible by not tying them to weekdays. If they do a session on Tuesday at 1am in the morning we thought that it should still count as a Monday session. That’s why streaks were based on a maximum time elapsed between sessions instead of hard rules.

But we realised that this just added too much complexity.

Streaks are now based on weekdays, from 00:00 to 24:00

We’re sorry for those of you that have a very uncommon work schedule, but even then we believe that it will be easier for you to understand when you’ll keep and when you’ll lose your streak.

Goodbye Weekend Jokers 🫡

In the same vein, we simplified how weekends work and bid farewell to Weekend Jokers. We had initially introduced them with the same intention: we wanted to make it possible for people to maintain a streak even if they didn’t do a session during weekends.

But because we wanted to accommodate people that don’t have a usual Mo-Fr work schedule we made the system flexible by issuing weekend jokers that could be used any day during the week — this made it hard to keep track of and caused confusion.

We are introducing rest days.
They are Saturday and Sunday by default.

With rest days, the rules are simple:

• Do at least one session every weekday (00:00 - 24:00) to keep your streak going.
• Rest days are excluded. You don’t have to do a session on a rest day to keep your streak.

Configure rest days

We still want to make it possible to have a different work schedule though, that’s why you can configure your two rest days on your settings page.

Timezones

This new change introduces an obvious problem: how do we determine the weekday when a session is completed given that people use Pausly from all over the world?

To solve this issue, we store timezones for all users. If you go to your settings, you’ll see which timezone your account is set to (it’s initialised with your browser settings).

If you go on vacation or move to a different country, you can change the timezone to make sure your streaks are counted properly.

We hope that these changes make it easier to understand how streaks work and that they will cause less frustration. We’re looking forward to your feedback!

Thanks for reading, and happy pausing!