It is reading your life, not your mood.

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What this is

You write what is actually going on. The app reads it and keeps a picture of your life that builds up entry by entry.

Nothing here is a test and nothing is graded. One entry moves the picture a little. The useful version of it is made of many.

The idea behind it

A life has four parts

Most advice treats a life as one thing that is either going well or badly. VentSpace splits it into four, because they rarely move together. You can be solid at work and quietly lonely, or surrounded by people and making nothing.

The idea behind it

Every part has two energies

Drive pushes, produces and takes responsibility. Ease rests, connects, reflects and lets go.

Ease is not idleness and it is not the weaker half. A life with no Ease burns out. A life with no Drive stalls. Both of them exist inside all four parts.

How it reads you

Balance is evenness, not a grade

For each of the four parts, balance asks one question: how even are Drive and Ease in there at the moment.

All push and no rest reads low. All rest and no movement reads low too. It is not a score of you as a person, and it moves both ways, week to week.

How it reads you

Attention is what you have been writing about

Each part also tracks how much of your attention it has had lately. Write about work for a fortnight and Root fills up. Mention nobody and Bond gets thin.

It fades when you go quiet. That is not a streak and nothing is lost. The moment you write about that part again, it comes back.

The plant

Everyone starts with a seedling

The tree is drawn from those two numbers and nothing else. Its size comes from how much of your life is getting attention, so it grows fastest when you write about more than one part of it.

Its health is shown part by part, so one dry branch stays visible instead of being averaged away.

• The rootsRoot. Work, money, routines, rest.
• The canopyBond. The people in your life.
• The new shootsExplore. Learning, making, play.
• The light behind itMeaning. What it is all for.

The plant

It can shrink, and that is the point

Go quiet for a few weeks and the tree fades back toward a small plant. Nothing is deducted and nothing is broken. A living thing is just showing you it has not been tended.

There is no finished state to reach and no trophy at the end. It is a picture of now, which is the only honest thing it could be.

The Inner Map

What your writing turns into

You write once. The map is what is left after, and it is the part worth coming back to.

If you want something to do

Challenges

Each one is a set of written days. A day is one thing to do and one question to answer, and every day comes with a smaller version for a bad day.

They are built in parts you can take in any order. A day you skip costs nothing, and the last day sets a date to look at it again rather than a finish line.

Honestly

Just write

Write when something is sitting with you. Look at the dashboard about once a week, not every day.

The picture is slow on purpose. It is reading your life, and a life does not change by Thursday.