Your Hats

Hats are the structural backbone of ATEND. Every task, project, appointment, and contact belongs to one. They drive the color system you've seen throughout the app, the neglect detection that surfaces in your weekly session, and the sovereignty map that shows where your time is actually going. This chapter covers how they work in depth — and how to manage them as your life changes.

What a hat actually is

A hat is a distinct life area — a context that has its own relationships, its own obligations, its own definition of what "on top of things" looks like. The Airbnb hat and the Book hat involve different people, different consequences when things slip, different energy, and a different version of you showing up to do the work. That's what makes a hat a hat, rather than just a tag or a label.

Most people land somewhere between four and seven hats. The system enforces a maximum of seven active at once — not as an arbitrary limit, but because more than seven starts to fragment your attention the same way a long task list does. If you find yourself wanting eight hats, two of them are probably adjacent enough to merge.

The minimum is two. You can't have just one hat — the distinction between your hats is part of what makes the neglect detection meaningful. A single hat would tell you nothing.

The color system

Each hat is assigned a color during setup. That color appears on every task row, every project card, every calendar event, and every time strip block belonging to that hat. Once you've been using ATEND for a few weeks, you can read the Launchpad at a glance without reading a single word — the color distribution tells you what kind of day it is and whether your attention is balanced or tilted.

The default palette has seven colors — one per possible hat:

You assign colors during hat setup and can change them at any time from Settings → Hats. The only constraint is that two active hats can't share the same color — the visual distinction is the point.

Managing your hats

Hat management lives in Settings → Hats. Every hat action is available there.

Expected activity levels

During hat setup — and editable at any time from Settings → Hats — you can set an expected activity level for each hat. This tells the neglect detection system what "normal" looks like for this particular area of your life.

If you don't set an expected activity level, ATEND builds a baseline from your actual usage over the first 60 days and uses that to calibrate what "neglected" means for each hat. A hat that has always been quiet won't be flagged for being quiet.

How the neglect detection works

The neglect detection system is one of ATEND's most important features — and one of its quietest. It runs in the background continuously, tracking engagement across your hats and surfacing observations at the right moments without interrupting your day.

What counts as activity

The system tracks five types of engagement, each weighted by how meaningful it is:

These events are weighted by recency — activity from this week counts far more than activity from three weeks ago. One completed task this week is worth more to your hat's health than ten completed tasks a month ago. The system is measuring present engagement, not historical output.

The four neglect statuses

There's also a fifth state — critically neglected — for hats that have had zero activity for 30 or more days. These get a warning card at the top of the hat pulse screen in the Weekly Architecture Session, and they're the one case where the neglect system generates a push notification: a single gentle weekly prompt, sent once and not repeated.

Where it surfaces

The neglect detection never interrupts your work. It surfaces in three places only:

The Weekly Architecture Session — Screen 4, the hat pulse, shows every hat sorted by neglect severity. Critically neglected hats appear as warning cards before the list. The prompt language adapts: a fading hat gets "[Hat] has been quiet. Anything you want to protect time for?" A neglected hat gets "[Hat] hasn't had any movement in 23 days. What's going on there?"

The progress dashboard — a four-week activity bar per hat, colored by current status. It's always there when you choose to look, but it never pushes itself at you.

The weekly coaching insight card — once per week at most, a single observation: which hats have been consistently active, which have drifted. One card. Never a notification.

The honest purpose of hats

ADHD has a particular relationship with sustained attention across multiple life areas. The urgent and interesting crowd out the important and quiet. The hat that involves other people and external pressure tends to get attention. The hat that involves only you — the book, the health practice, the long-term project with no external deadline — tends to get whatever's left. Which is usually nothing.

Hats exist to make that pattern visible. The time strip shows you which hats are consuming your calendar time. The fit score boosts tasks in Big Three-linked hats. The neglect detection surfaces quiet hats before they've been quiet for a season. The sovereignty map shows which hats your discretionary time is actually going to.

None of this tells you what to do. But it makes the choices you're actually making legible — which is the first step toward making them deliberately.