Why a Kaizen score
works for me.
I have tried, at this point, every system for keeping notes alive. Daily check-ins, weekly reviews, dashboards, gamified streaks. Most of them feel like work. The one that has stuck — for almost a year now — is a single number that quietly tells me when something is going stale.
The shape of an honest signal
Most knowledge tools measure activity, not maintenance. A note can be a graveyard of half-finished thoughts and still show a green dot. The thing I actually want to know is whether the document is current — has it been read, has it been edited recently, do the references in it still point to things that exist.
That is what a Kaizen score is, in Orimora. Not a gamification trick. A composite of last-edited, last-read, and reference health, with the oldest signal weighted slightly more than the freshest. It punishes the notes I open but never change, and rewards the ones I actually keep.
What changed in the last six months
I have around four hundred notes in my library. Six months ago, around 60% of them were stale by my own definition. I knew because the score was showing me, gently, every time I opened the library. The number was the same as the discomfort. That was the moment the system stopped being decoration and started being a feedback loop.
Three things I did differently:
- Lower the resolution of the signal. I used to track per-paragraph freshness. Per-document is enough. The grain that matters is "should I still trust this?"
- Surface the score in the editor, not just the sidebar. If the number is far from the writing, I forget to look.
- Make decay visible, not silent. A note doesn't just drop. It fades. The first time I saw a yellow ring on a doc I cared about, I opened it that evening.
The risk of turning a number into a leaderboard
Kaizen is easy to make into a game. Streaks, levels, badges — they work, up to a point. The trap is that the leaderboard becomes the goal. You write to keep the streak alive, not because the note matters. The score is a tool, not a target.
What gets measured gets managed. What gets gamified gets performed.
For me the trick has been to keep the score private. Not a number I share, not a number I optimize against. A number I read once a week, in the same mood I read a journal. If it nudges me to open a document, that's the whole job. If I open the document and find it doesn't matter anymore, the right answer is to archive it, not to rewrite it to please the score.
What the rest of the library looks like
The number I watch most is the median pulse across the library, not the average. Averages hide a long tail of zombie documents. Median says: how is the typical note doing, today. If the median is dropping week over week, I have a maintenance problem. If it is steady, the library is healthy.
It turns out that the median pulse is a much better indicator of how I am feeling about the work than the number of notes I wrote this month. I can write forty notes and still have a sick library, if those forty notes are not the ones I needed to maintain. I can write three and have a healthy one, if those three are the documents the team actually reads.
What I would tell someone starting out
Start with the smallest number that means something. One number. Read it once a week. Don't share it. Don't optimize it. If the number doesn't make you feel anything after a month, throw it out and try a different one. The point isn't to have a system. The point is to have a system that changes a behavior you wanted to change.
Mine changed me. I open stale notes. I rewrite them when they need it. I archive them when they don't. The library is, for the first time, a place I want to spend time in.