Sharpness is progress you build with effort and skill.

What Sharpness is not

Sharpness is not a cognitive test result. It does not measure intelligence, it does not measure clinical cognition, and it does not predict performance at school, work, or sport. It is an internal Senwitt metric, the way a fitness app might show readiness or training load. The numeric scale is intentionally simple so it does not look like a clinical score.

Real cognitive assessments — the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale, the Stroop test, the digit span subtest — are administered by trained professionals, standardised against population norms, and interpreted in context. They take longer than seven minutes, they cost money, and they tell you something Sharpness deliberately does not try to tell you. Senwitt publishes honest explainers for the best-known ones at /tests/ so the difference between a real cognitive test and a daily-practice habit metric stays clear.

How Sharpness moves

Sharpness is shaped by four things: effort, skill, breadth across the Skills you picked, and recovery. None is weighted overwhelmingly. The intent is to make the number feel honest — a quiet week is visible, a good week is visible, and one dazzling Set does not warp the signal.

• InputEffortDid you show up today? Did you complete the Set, or skip after one rep? Consistency of attendance is the larger of the two signals — Sharpness rewards habit before it rewards skill.
• InputSkillHow did the reps go across the Skills you picked? Sharpness reads accuracy, decisiveness, and the willingness to attempt harder reps over time. A wrong answer attempted is treated more generously than an item skipped.
• InputBreadthAre you practising across the three to six Skills you committed to, or letting half drift? Belts on the Senwitt Path require breadth, not depth in one area only.
• InputRecoverySharpness moves gradually. A bad Set after a great week does not erase the week; a great Set after a quiet stretch does not catapult the rating. The shape of recent weeks matters more than the shape of any one day.

Why we built it this way

Three design constraints shaped Sharpness. First, it had to be visible enough to feel like progress, but quiet enough to not turn into a leaderboard. Strava-style competitive metrics produced enormous engagement in early prototypes and also produced the exact pressure-driven behaviour Senwitt is supposed to be a relief from. Second, it had to move slowly. Daily-progress apps that swing wildly in either direction trigger streak-anxiety patterns Duolingo wrote about publicly and corrected for in their own product (Duolingo Streak Society). Third, it had to be private. A Sharpness rating is never shared by Senwitt with third parties or shown on a public leaderboard. It exists for you.

Sharpness, Belts, and what unlocks what

Sustained Sharpness across categories is what unlocks the next Belt on the Senwitt Path. Sustained means the rating has to hold across several weeks of practice, not spike for one. Belt thresholds rise as you progress — the gap from White to Yellow is small, the gap from Brown to Black is wide. The intent is to reward the habit becoming ordinary, not the habit being briefly intense.

Belts also do not expire. If you take a quiet stretch and come back, your Belt is where you left it. Sharpness will have softened, but Belt rank reflects the work you did to reach it.

Privacy and what we do not do

Sharpness is private to your account. We do not publish it, we do not sell it, and Senwitt does not present it as a cognitive assessment to any third party. Treat it like a personal pace meter — useful to you, meaningful inside the app, and never something Senwitt promises represents your real-world cognitive ability. The full data-handling story is in the privacy policy.