Adaptation: how Donna adjusts to your day

Donna adapts to your current state instead of holding you to a plan you set earlier. It reads whether you are running low, in the groove, or wound up, and adjusts accordingly. This page is the model behind that behavior; Bad days walks one rough day as it actually plays out.

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How Donna reads your state

Donna infers your state from the rhythm of your day and how you show up:

• what you say
• what you skip
• how the day compares to the plan

It does not read your screen or track what you do outside Donna.

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No scoreboard

Donna keeps no score:

• No streaks.
• Nothing is marked late.
• Skipped or unfinished work is never shown as a count.

If you stop for a day, a week, or a month, Donna starts from the current day when you return: no summary of the gap, no backlog of missed items, no scolding about the time away. You get a normal morning check-in for the day you are on. The numbers you do see are descriptive. The weekly review names what happened, like the report moving four times this week, and never compares it to a plan, a streak, or what you did not do. Procrastination research finds that guilt after a slip predicts more avoidance, while self-forgiveness predicts less of it next time (Sirois and Pychyl, 2013; Wohl and colleagues, 2010).

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A rough day

On a genuinely rough day, the whole interaction might be a single message: “Hey. Rough one. One thing or nothing, your call.” That message is complete, and “nothing” is a real answer. See Bad days for how a rough day plays out. The guide on getting through an ADHD bad day covers the same day from your side: naming the kind of day it is and setting the floor at one small thing or nothing.

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Why it varies day to day

Brains tune out repetition, so Donna varies how it shows up from day to day: the angle it takes, the opening line, and the pacing. When Donna is not sure what you need, it does less rather than more.