Most time management systems tell you what happened after the fact. You do a weekly review, notice you didn't do much deep work, feel vaguely bad about it, and move on. By the time you're doing the review, the week is over. The moment to intervene has passed.
SIGNAL is designed to flip this. It doesn't analyze the past week — it watches the current week as it unfolds and alerts you while there's still time to adjust.
What SIGNAL Actually Does
SIGNAL is behavioral pattern detection. It compares your current week's layer distribution against your rolling four-week average — the baseline of how your time has actually been allocated, not how you intended to allocate it. When the current week diverges meaningfully from that baseline in one of three specific ways, it sends an alert.
The Three Signal Types
- →Drift — a layer is consistently running below its target allocation for three or more consecutive days. This is the slow erosion signal: the category is losing ground, but gently enough that you might not notice without data.
- →Overload — your meeting density has exceeded your configured threshold for the week. This fires when you've crossed, say, 60% of your working hours in meetings, giving you warning before the week fully derails.
- →Erosion — focus time is declining week-over-week. This fires when CADENCE blocks have been repeatedly deleted or overwritten by meetings, showing you the structural problem before it becomes a habit.
Why Email Delivery
SIGNAL alerts are delivered by email, not push notification. The design choice was deliberate. You check email in the morning, before the day's decisions are made. A push notification at 2pm about a pattern in your week isn't actionable — the day is already shaped. An email in your inbox at 7am, when you're deciding how to approach the day, is.
A signal at the right moment is worth ten dashboards you check after the fact.
What a SIGNAL Alert Looks Like
An actual drift alert: 'Business Development is at 3% this week (your 4-week average is 14%). Today and tomorrow both have open morning blocks. Consider protecting one for BD work.' It's not a notification for its own sake — it identifies the gap, shows the data, and points to a specific opportunity.
Configuring Your Thresholds
You set layer targets during onboarding — the percentage of working time you intend each category to represent. You can also configure your meeting density threshold (what percentage of the week in meetings triggers an overload signal) and your minimum focus block hours. SIGNAL only fires when the deviation is meaningful against your own targets, not against some universal standard.