A checkbox you tick in private is easy to skip. Nobody notices. A blank day costs you nothing beyond the small private disappointment you have already learned to live with. A shared board is different. On a shared board a blank day is visible, so the Tuesday evening walk stops being a nice idea and turns into something you actually go and do.
That is the whole reason this app has competitions. On October 1 it runs its first public one: Season 0: Founding Heroes. Open to every account, free, one leaderboard for everybody, running to October 31. The person at the top of it gets to name Season 1.
Why a season
Duels work well between two people who already know each other. Private competitions work for a team or a group of friends. Neither helps the person who signs up on a Tuesday night with nobody to race. That person opens the leaderboard, sees their own name sitting alone at the top of an empty list, then quietly stops opening the app at all. I have watched that pattern in the numbers more than once.
A season fixes it by giving everyone the same start line on the same day. You do not have to recruit anyone. You do not have to know anyone. You join one board that already has people on it, then your checkboxes start counting against theirs. For the longer argument about why any of this works, there is social habit tracking: why it works.
What Season 0 is
One site-wide competition, running October 1 to October 31, 2026. It starts at your local midnight. The last scoring day is October 31. Points come from the same place they always come from: the checkboxes in your own Notion habit tracker, read live every time you open the widget, with the nightly safety-net sync running in your own timezone. There is nothing new to learn. If you have never run a competition here, habit competitions in Notion walks through how the scoring behaves.
You can join before the season or during it. Points count from the day you join, so joining on October 20 is allowed but expensive. Joining before October 1 means you score from day one.
The honest part
Season 0 will be small. This is a solo project with a modest number of connected accounts, so the first season is not going to look like a thousand-person tournament, whatever the word "season" suggests. I will be in it myself, tracking the same habits as everyone else, although my own accounts cannot take the naming right.
Small is rather the point of a Season 0. Every series has to start somewhere, with a first group who turned up before it was obvious the thing would work. That group gets a badge that stays on the account, a place in the record, plus the right to say they were there. Season 4 will be bigger. Season 0 is first.
The founding class names Season 1
Whoever finishes Season 0 with the most points chooses the name of Season 1, which runs December 1 to December 31, 2026. That name goes on the homepage, on the competition page, into the season start email every participant receives, into the announcement post.
The short version of the rules: highest total points takes it. Ties break on higher average completion percentage first, then more perfect days, then the earlier join date. My own accounts are excluded, so the right passes to the next eligible finisher. The winner has 14 days after my results email to send a name. The full competition title reads "Season 1: your name" inside 50 characters, which is what the name field holds. I can refuse a name that is trademarked, offensive, or otherwise unpublishable, in which case I ask for another one rather than swapping it quietly. If nothing usable arrives inside the 14 days, I name the season myself while still crediting the winner.
The full rules, none of them shortened, live on the Season 0 page.
How to join, in three steps
First, open the Season 0 join page and create a free account there. Second, connect your Notion habit tracker. If you do not have one yet, duplicate the free template, which takes about a minute, then connect that. Third, back on the join page, one click puts you on the leaderboard.
Do those three things before October 1 to be on the board from the first scoring day. There is no entry fee. Notion Habit Heroes is free for individuals, so the season costs nothing either.
What happens after October 31
Standings are final once the last timezone has left October 31, which puts the results on November 1 or 2. Anyone still in the competition at the close with more than zero points counts as a finisher. Finishers get the Founding Hero badge on their account, awarded automatically, plus a place in the Season 0 hall of fame post here on the blog.
Then December, under a name I did not pick.