The clock only moves when something real happens

Every tool you have kept your work in has a number that is meant to tell you how a thing is doing, and every one of those numbers can be moved without doing any work. "Last updated" moves when you rename something. A card at the top of a column is at the top because you dragged it there. A progress bar fills when you add tasks, which is the opposite of what a progress bar should do. None of this is dishonest on purpose. It is what happens when the number a tool shows can be changed without doing the thing the number is supposed to measure.

Brassdeck has one number per card: how long since this actually moved. It is the one thing on the card you cannot fake, and it is the reason the rest of the app is shaped the way it is.

What moves it

Five things, and they are the five things that mean a card went somewhere:

Finishing a step. Ticking something off is the clearest kind of progress there is. Deciding the next step. This counts on purpose. A card with no next step is not waiting on time, it is waiting on you, and the decision is often the only thing between it and moving. Changing the stage. A spark that becomes something you are shaping, or a build that goes live, has moved by definition. Parking or dropping it. Stopping on purpose is a decision about the card, and a decision is progress. It stays on the board with the date, or the reason. Picking it back up.

What does not

This is the list that makes the number worth reading, because everything on it is something a tool could easily count and most tools do.

Writing more steps. Describing work is not doing it. If adding ten steps to a card moved its clock, the app would be rewarding you for making the pile bigger, and you would get very good at making the pile bigger. Renaming it. Dragging it somewhere neater. Tidying a board is a real activity and a pleasant one, and it changes nothing about whether the work is happening. Opening it and reading it. Writing in the notes. Marking it as waiting on someone. That last one surprises people, so it gets its own section.

Waiting is not moving

A card can be marked as waiting on somebody, with their name and a count of days. That stops the app calling it stalled, because the next step is known; it just is not yours. But the clock keeps running. A card that has been waiting on a supplier for forty days has, in fact, not moved for forty days, and that is the single most useful thing the board can tell you about it. Pausing the clock for a wait would let a card sit for a quarter looking healthy because somebody else has it, which is how work dies politely.

What a quiet card looks like

A card nobody has moved in a while does not turn red. Red is a tool telling you off, and being told off about something you deliberately set aside is what makes people close the tool and never come back. Instead the paper tints toward the desk, the way paper left out does. The writing on it stays as readable as on any other card. You can see it has gone quiet without being asked to feel anything about it.

How fast it fades is scaled to the card's own cadence, which you set. A quarterly idea untouched for forty days is fine and fades barely at all. A weekly one untouched for forty days is a different matter, and the fade knows the difference. Set the cadence to never and that card never fades, however long it sits; some things are supposed to sit.

Two kinds of card are exempt entirely. A note has no clock, because a note is not an idea you are carrying, it is something you wrote down so you could stop carrying it. And a finished card never fades, because counting the days since you last touched something because you finished it is the meanest arithmetic a tool could do.

Stopping is a real outcome

Because a decision counts as progress, a card you deliberately stop is not a failure the app hides from you. Park it with a date and it waits. Drop it with a reason and it stays on the board saying so. Months later you can see what you decided against and why, which is worth more than any status column, and the reasons collect on their own page so you can see what keeps happening to you. Most people find the same reason three times before they believe it.

What this costs you

Honesty is uncomfortable for about a week. There is a moment, early on, when you tidy the board, rearrange everything, write out your plans in detail, and look up to find that not one clock has moved. That moment is the product working. The tools that let the number move when you tidy are more pleasant to use and they are lying to you, and after a few months the board is full of things that look recently touched and you cannot tell which of them is alive.

After the week, the number becomes the thing you trust. You stop asking whether something is going well and start asking when it last moved, which is a question with an answer.

Where this is written down

The rule lives in the code: an event is progress unless the app says it is not, and the list above is the list of things it says are not. The manual covers the rest, including the stages, the waiting state and what a share link shows a client. It is free to start, with nothing to configure.