How to Master Progress
TLDR: Progress shows five live bars that fill in real time · year, month, week, day and hour · plus a personal to-do list underneath, and you can pick any time zone to watch the clock tick over around the world. Mastery is not a score. It is using the bars for honest time awareness and ticking real tasks off so your all-time “completed” counter keeps climbing · that lifetime number is the long game.
What You’re Actually Learning
Progress is not a puzzle you win. It is two tools stacked together. The top half is a column of live bars showing how far through the year, month, week, day and hour you currently are; they fill in real time, so the day bar visibly creeps forward while you watch. The point is calibration: most people misjudge how much of a window is already gone, and seeing “Today: 71%” at dinner reframes the evening instantly.
The bottom half is your own to-do list. Tick a box and your personal “Completed” bar fills, but the number that matters is below it · “Tasks completed all-time”. That counter only ever goes up, and it is the real long game. So two skills are in play: time awareness from the bars, and a completion habit from the list.
Reading the Live Bars for Time Awareness
The five bars run coarse to fine: year, month, week (which starts on Monday), day and hour. Glance top to bottom and you sense where you stand at every scale at once. The most useful habit is checking the day bar at decision points · by late afternoon, it passing 70% is a genuine nudge to start whatever you have been putting off.
Anchor on the empty part, not the full part: A bar at 65% is easy to read as “most of it is done, relax.” Flip it · 35% is left, and that is the part you can still act on. Looking at the remaining slice is the single biggest mindset shift this game offers.
Use the week bar for honest planning: Because the week starts Monday, a Friday-morning glance often shows it already past 70%. If your weekly goals are barely started, the bar is telling you the truth your calendar is hiding · let it pull the important task forward instead of into “next week.”
Building a Completion Habit With the To-Do List
This is where the long-term payoff lives. Add a task in the box (Enter or the Add button both work), tick it when done, and your lifetime counter ticks up by one. Keep entries short and concrete · “email the dentist” beats “sort out health stuff.” A vague task never gets ticked, so it never feeds the counter. The mechanics reward finishing, not collecting: completing a task is the only thing that raises the all-time total · adding, removing, or un-ticking never touches it · so it stays an honest record.
Run a daily clear-and-climb loop: Each morning add the two or three things you intend to finish today, and tick them as you go. Then use “Clear done” to tidy the list · clearing does not reset your lifetime total, so it keeps climbing even after the list is empty. That combination of a fresh list and a permanent score is what makes this a sustainable habit rather than a growing pile of guilt.
Make tasks bar-sized: The hour bar pairs naturally with small tasks. Pick something you can finish before it fills, then race it. Sizing your to-dos to fit a visible window makes them far more likely to get ticked · the only thing that grows your lifetime count.
Removing a task is not the same as completing it: The ✕ remove button deletes a task without crediting your lifetime counter, and so does un-ticking a box. For the all-time number to mean anything, only tick things you truly finished, and do not delete real work just to shrink the list · tick it, then clear it.
Sign In So Your Streak Survives
Look for the line under the list: it reads either “Saved on this device · sign in to sync across devices” or “Saved to your account · synced across devices.” That line is doing a lot of quiet work. While you are signed out, your tasks and lifetime total live only in this browser. Clear your site data, switch to your phone, or open a different browser, and the count starts again from zero · a real risk for a number whose whole value is that it keeps climbing for months.
The lifetime counter is only as durable as where it is stored: Sign in early, before the number is big enough to hurt losing. Once signed in, the all-time total and your list follow your account across every device, safe from a cleared cache or a new browser. Protecting the streak is most of what “mastery” means here.
Watching the Clock Tick Around the World
The time zone selector above the bars is the playful part. Pick any city · Los Angeles, London, Dubai, Tokyo, Sydney, Auckland and more · and every bar instantly recomputes for that zone’s local time. On load the game already tries to match your own zone, so the bars start out describing your day. It is useful too: if you work across zones, read a colleague’s day bar to see at a glance whether they are starting or winding down.
Catch the rollover: Set the zone to a city hours ahead of you and watch its day bar reach 100% and snap back to near-zero before yours does. Seeing a new day literally begin somewhere else is the fastest way to internalize how time zones work.
One detail to keep in mind: the zones use standard time and do not adjust for daylight saving, as the FAQ notes on purpose. So in a region’s summer months its bars can sit about an hour behind that city’s wall clock. For time awareness and rollover-watching this is fine · just do not treat it as a to-the-minute world clock.
What Mastery Looks Like
There is no win screen and no high score to chase, so mastery is a behaviour, not a number you beat. You have mastered Progress when checking the bars has changed how you spend your time · when a day bar past 70% reliably moves you to act, and adding, ticking and clearing tasks has become an automatic daily loop. The clearest signal is the lifetime counter quietly growing week after week while you are signed in. Keep the bars honest, keep the tasks small and real, sign in so nothing is lost, and that climbing count becomes the proof.
Progress
Live bars for how far through the year, month, week, day and hour you are · switch time zones, and keep a saved to-do list
Play nowWorks on any device.
