How Goodday scores a day

A day is a budget of hours

You get a fixed number of them, and how you spend them is one of the biggest levers on how you feel. Goodday's job is to turn that spending into one honest number.

Every day starts at 55 points out of 100 - a neutral day, doing nothing remarkable. Then each activity you log moves the number at a rate per hour, taken from published wellbeing research.

Rates, not flat bonuses

A half-hour walk earns half of what an hour does. That keeps everything comparable: a sea swim at +14 points per hour is worth more of your time than a commute at -6, and the score only cares what you did with the hour, not how proud you are of it.

Nothing is worth infinite points

This is the part most scoring systems get wrong. Every activity has a cap - the point where more stops helping.

• Vigorous exercise: +12 per hour, capped at 90 minutes.
• Time in nature: +9 per hour, capped at 120 minutes.
• Time with your kids: +10 per hour, capped at 180 minutes.

The research is consistent here. The mental-health benefit of exercise seems to plateau at roughly an hour a day, so logging three hours of running should not beat logging one hour of running plus an hour with friends. In Goodday, it doesn't.

The costly things get an allowance

Real life includes commuting, television and a bit of scrolling. Goodday gives the expensive activities a free allowance before they start costing you anything.

• TV and streaming: the first 60 minutes are free, then -7 per hour, capped at three hours.
• Social media: 30 minutes free, then -12 per hour.
• Commuting: 30 minutes free, then -6 per hour.

Past the allowance, the cost still has a ceiling. A bad day is a bad day - it isn't a zero.

Sleep is scored differently

Sleep isn't a rate, it's a target: seven to nine hours scores best, and too little and too much both pull the day down. It is checked first because almost everything else in the app depends on it.

What the score is for

The number is not a verdict on you. It is a comparison - today against your own last two weeks - so the suggestions are about your patterns rather than somebody else's ideal day.