Manager Mode

Setting it up

Open My Manager under the Workspace group and turn on Manager Mode. Pick a style — supportive, balanced, or demanding — which sets the tone of how it talks to you.

Then set your working days and your FOCUSED hours per day. That word is doing the work: not hours at a desk, focused hours. Most people have three to five, not eight, and deadlines built on eight are deadlines nobody hits.

Being honest here is the whole game. An optimistic focused-hours number produces deadlines that are wrong in the same direction every time, and then the feature is just a machine that tells you that you are behind.

It is entirely private. No other member can see your commitments, your check-ins, or your points.

Committing

Add a commitment with your own estimate. The preview shows the date it actually lands on and why.

That date is computed rather than chosen. It reflects your calibration — your real estimate-versus-actual history — your focused capacity, and the work you have already committed to. New work queues behind existing commitments rather than magically fitting alongside them.

This is the part that surprises people first and helps most. A commitment you thought was a two-day job landing three weeks out is not the tool being pessimistic; it is the tool showing you the queue you had already accepted.

The two decisions that keep it honest

A reward system that can be gamed teaches gaming, so two things are deliberately fixed.

Points are FLAT per commitment, not scaled by the estimate. If points scaled with size, padding an estimate would win twice — a bigger estimate already buys a later deadline, and it would also pay more. Flat points remove that entirely: the only way to earn more is to complete more commitments.

And the on-time verdict is measured against the deadline frozen when you committed, not against the current one. You can renegotiate a deadline — and you should, when something genuinely changes — but the score still remembers what you originally said. Otherwise moving the date on the morning it comes due would guarantee a full payout, which would make the score meaningless.

Those two together mean the score measures what it claims to measure. Renegotiating is honest and visible; it just does not erase the original commitment.

Check-ins and renegotiation

Check-ins arrive on the cadence you set. Answer them.

When something has slipped, renegotiate that deadline rather than letting it lapse. A renegotiated commitment is a live one with a new date and an honest record; a lapsed one is a commitment everyone quietly stops looking at, which is the exact failure Manager Mode exists to prevent.

The useful reframe: renegotiation is not failure, it is the mechanism. Letting things lapse is the failure.

The credits payout

Points can be converted into real account credits. This is off by default and requires two things together: ticking the conversion option AND setting a monthly cap. Both are required, deliberately.

There is also a weekly cap on point accrual, which bounces volume gaming — someone splitting work into twenty tiny commitments to farm flat points.

One detail worth knowing about that cap: it clamps credits, never debits. Hitting the cap means you stop earning, not that anything is taken away.

Whether to enable the payout at all is a judgment. It works well as a small, capped reward for a habit you already want. It works badly as an incentive that someone is trying to maximize, which is true of every incentive.