You now have the whole of Unit 1’s model: what burnout is, the ratio behind it, the recovery half, and the one thing not to mistake it for. Before Unit 2, one small habit to start — it takes about twenty seconds a day.

At the end of each day, rate two things: how much the day took out of you, and how much you got back. That’s it. Demands and recovery — the two halves of Lesson 2’s ratio, as you actually experienced them today.

Why two numbers rather than one? Because a single “how bad was today” hides the thing this program is about. Two nine-out-of-ten days are completely different if one of them ended with an evening that gave something back and the other didn’t — and the difference between those two days is the entire subject of Unit 2.

What it is not: it’s not a burnout score, it has no bands, and there is no target. Lesson 1 explained why there’s no severity grade here, and this is that decision made concrete. The check-in reads a day, not a person.

It also doesn’t go anywhere. Nothing here leaves your device, and nobody — not an employer, not a manager, not us — sees it. Nothing in this app monitors you or follows up.

Do it for a week before Unit 2. There are two reasons, and the second is the real one.

The obvious reason is that Unit 2’s readout works from your own entries, and a week is roughly the minimum that shows anything.

The less obvious one: most people can’t answer the recovery question at first. The demands number arrives instantly — you know exactly what today cost. The recovery number produces a pause, and then often a zero. The pause is the finding. Recovery has usually stopped being something you notice at all — which is precisely how it stopped happening.