Focus Streaks, Heatmaps & the Desk Plant in DeepCycle

DeepCycle turns completed focus cycles into three kinds of feedback: an honest record (activity heatmaps), a habit anchor (streaks and the virtual desk plant), and a balance check (the wellness score). All of it is computed and stored locally on your device — there is no account and nothing sits on a server under your name.

The heatmap: an honest record

Memory says the week was productive; the heatmap says which parts of it were. Activity heatmaps show which days and hours you genuinely focused, built from the cycles you actually completed rather than the hours you sat at the desk. Over a few weeks, patterns surface that self-report never catches — the mid-afternoon slot where cycles reliably collapse, the one weekday that is consistently deep, the slow drift of your productive window.

That record is also how you evaluate the rest of your setup. Changed your cycle length? Added a domain to the block list in Deep Focus Mode? The heatmap two weeks later is the answer to whether it worked.

Streaks and the desk plant: why they help

The streak counts consecutive days with completed focus cycles, and the virtual desk plant advances through four growth stages as completed cycles accumulate. Both work on the same principle: an abstract habit becomes an object with a visible state, and abandoning a session stops being free because something is keeping score.

This is the same mechanism that makes language-app streaks effective, applied to deep work. The plant is deliberately gentle — it grows with progress rather than punishing lapses — but it gives the fortieth minute of a hard cycle a reason beyond willpower: quitting now costs something you can see.

The wellness score: focus and recovery in balance

The wellness score summarises how your focus time and your breaks balanced out — cycles completed against eye-rest prompts honoured, movement breaks taken, and hydration logged against your daily goal. It is a self-tracking summary of what you logged in the extension, not a health assessment or medical measurement of any kind.

Its value is catching the failure mode analytics usually miss: the week that looks great on the heatmap because you ran ten-hour days without standing up. Deep work that skips every recovery prompt borrows from the sessions that come after it, and the score is designed to make that borrowing visible before it compounds.

Next steps

• Tune your cycle and wellness intervals
• Close the gaps the heatmap reveals