Why a daily target?
6 May 2026
Graham Greene wrote five hundred words a day. He counted as he went, and when he reached the number he stopped, sometimes mid-sentence, so the next morning he knew exactly where to pick up. Over forty years, he produced twenty-five novels.
That practice is where the app's name comes from. A small daily commitment, then walking away, then showing up again tomorrow. None of it is ours and we don't claim it, but we did want a writing app that held the shape of it in place without making a performance of the fact.
Why five hundred
Five hundred words is roughly an hour of writing for most people, less for some, more for others. It's a number that fits into a Tuesday. It's also enough that, kept up, a draft appears on the other side.
At five hundred words a day, an 80,000-word novel takes about six months. The number doesn't have to be five hundred, and the app lets you set whatever target suits the way you write. Five hundred is the default because it doesn't require a clear weekend or a creative-retreat week to hit. It fits into a real life.
The streak counts the way real weeks work
The streak counts the days you've hit the target in a row. The word "streak" elsewhere in software tends to carry a sharper edge: break it once, start over. Ours is gentler than that.
Rest days are the mechanism. Pick the weekdays you don't expect to write, whether that's a regular weekend off, a Wednesday you're never free, or whatever your week actually looks like, and the streak skips over them rather than breaking. If you find yourself writing on a rest day anyway, it counts.
Turning it off
Not every writer wants a daily target. Some work in long bursts. Others find numerical goals unhelpful. So the target can be set to whatever feels right, can be different from one project to another, or can be turned off without losing the rest of the writing statistics. With targeting off, the streak counter disappears and the panel carries on tracking your word counts in the background.
That flexibility mattered to us. A daily target is only any use if it supports a practice you already wanted to keep.