How Tidywell picks what to clean next
The cleanliness percentage, the priority score, and the room health number, explained without the maths. Together they decide what's on your Today list.
Cleanliness drops slowly. Cleaning resets it to 100%.
Every recurring task has a frequency, like "every 3 days" or "every 2 weeks". Tidywell uses that frequency to draw an invisible line from 100% (just cleaned) down to 0% (one full cycle has passed). The percentage you see is wherever today sits on that line. Nothing is stored, the number is recalculated every time you open the app.
Vacuum the living room, every 4 days
Frequency: 4 days
Day 0 is the day you ticked it off. By Day 4, you've used the full cycle and the task is at 0%. After that the number stays at 0%, it doesn't keep going negative. Tap Complete and it's back to 100% for another four days.
It's a forecast, not a sensor
Tidywell can't see your floors. The percentage is just "how much of the cleaning cycle has elapsed". If your hall genuinely got grubbier in one day, the number won't catch up, but the priority score (next section) makes sure overdue tasks still bubble up.
It can't go below 0% or above 100%
Once a task is fully overdue, it stops decaying further visually. There's no "-30% overdue" state. Internally, the priority score keeps tracking how late something is, so the most overdue thing still wins the queue, but the bar you see plateaus at 0%.
Calendar-aware, not 30-day arithmetic
"Every 1 month" honours actual months. Clean on Jan 31, the next due date is Feb 28 (or 29 in a leap year), not March 2nd. Same for "every 1 year". Small thing, but it matters for tasks that anchor to a calendar event.
Why an easy task can jump the queue
Something has to pick what lands on your Today list. A small bit of maths runs under the hood, but you'll never see the number itself. You'll just notice the pattern: easy tasks that are a little late tend to bubble up before hard tasks that are very late.
The two ingredients
How overdue + how easy
Tidywell looks at two things: how overdue a task is, and how light it is. The first matters more, but the second still matters. A quick job that's a little late can beat a deep job that's very late, because the small win is the better start.
Deep clean the oven
Wipe kitchen counters
Surfaces firstWipe counters wins, even though the oven is more overdue. The oven's effort weight pulls it down the queue. The idea is that you'll do the easy thing, feel a small win, and roll into the harder one, rather than skip both because the oven feels mountainous.
Being late doesn't pile up forever
Once a task gets badly overdue, it stops climbing the queue further. After that point, effort becomes the meaningful tiebreaker again. This stops one ancient task from permanently parking itself at the top of every list.
Why bias toward easy?
Momentum beats willpower most days, especially with ADHD brains. Five small wins build the energy for one big push. One big push at the start of an empty day usually ends with a closed app and a guilty feeling. Tidywell would rather you start with a tick than stare at a mountain.
Room health is a weighted average, not a simple one
Each room shows a single percentage on the Home tab. It's a weighted average of every task in that room. Heavier-effort tasks pull the average more than light ones. A spotless mirror doesn't rescue a filthy floor.
Bathroom
90%
60%
20%
Two of the tasks are basically fine. The deep clean is heavily overdue and it's the heaviest job in the room, so it pulls the room number down hard. The bathroom reads 32% even though most of the room is clean.
Why effort-weight at all?
Without weighting, a room with twenty tiny tasks (dust this, wipe that) and one big one (mop) could read 90% clean while the floor was filthy. Weighting by effort matches what a clean room actually feels like. The heavy stuff dominates the impression of a room more than the small jobs do.
Where these numbers actually surface
You almost never see the priority score directly. Cleanliness percentages and room health are everywhere though. Here's where each one shows up.
Today tab
Your Today list is filled by priority score, capped by your daily budget. Higher-scoring tasks appear first. The little progress bar on each task is its cleanliness percentage.
Home tab
Each room card shows that room's health percentage with a status label. "Sparkling" at 80%+, "No rush" from 50 to 79, "Needs love" from 20 to 49, "Needs you" below 20. The dollhouse view dims rooms that are slipping so you can spot trouble at a glance.
Room detail
Tap a room and you'll see every task, each with its own cleanliness percentage and overdue chip. This is the screen where you can see why the room average is what it is.
Insights (Premium)
The Insights screen graphs your overall cleanliness over time, plus a per-room trend. Useful for spotting which room you keep neglecting, and which weekday you actually clean on.