The attention tool
Not because you decided against them. They just got crowded out.
One morning ritual. The things that matter get your attention. The rest takes care of itself.
That's Strop.
Your stack is where your attention commitments live. You build it by installing chops and strops — as few or as many as your life calls for.
Every morning, Clear and Build give you Today from your stack. The system handles the bookkeeping. You do the work.
Everything you install into your stack is an action, with one of two shapes.
Some are tied to a day — pay it on the 3rd, renew the registration by the 31st, get the trash out Tuesday night. The rest you just want to happen at some regular pace, and the particular days don't matter.
That's the whole classification. Is it tied to a particular day, or do you just want it to happen at some regular pace?
Pay the mortgage on the 3rd. Renew the registration by the 31st. Get the trash out Tuesday night. Miss the day and it's late.
Bounded by a date.
Walk a half mile, three times a week. Volunteer, twice a month. Stay in touch with your brother, once a month. You pick the rate. The days you do it are up to you.
Bounded by a rate.
An action, not a goal.
A goal makes you decide what to do every time you go to do it. Eat better how, today? A specific action already had its deciding done, once, when you set it up. You just do it.
This is the morning ritual. It takes about a minute.
Every day starts blank.
Yesterday's list doesn't roll over, doesn't pile up, and doesn't sit there in red waiting to be explained. It's gone.
Assemble the day. Takes about a minute.
The app lays out your stack — chops by due date, strops by pace — and starts you with whatever needs attention. Add what fits, remove what doesn't. It knows the dates and rates. You know Thursday is a mess.
The rest of the day happens here.
Check things off as they get done. Swipe off anything that isn't happening — swiping isn't failing, it means not today, and it'll be offered again tomorrow.
I built this because I needed it, and I've run it every morning since March. These are the three cases that convinced me it works.
I wasn't practicing. I was stuck on the idea that under two hours a day was pointless, so I did nothing at all, and felt principled about it.
I tried four small ones instead: sight reading, ear training, and key signatures at five minutes each, plus ten minutes on the fretboard. All three times a week. Some weeks I hit them Monday, some weeks Saturday.
Sixty-some sessions later I'd worked through every drill. Years of not sticking with this, and the problem was never the two hours I didn't have. It was that I'd set the bar somewhere I could never clear.
I started with two: a piece of fruit three times a week, and a serving of vegetables twice. That's it. It was so easy that a few weeks in I bumped both to five.
Then kefir. Then a fermented food. Then an actual breakfast instead of nothing. None of it was a decision to eat better — each one just looked obvious once the one before it was running. I'm at fifteen or so now, all of them five or ten minutes, and I've dropped twenty pounds without being on anything.
I didn't need discipline. I needed the first one to be small enough to be stupid.
College is two years out for my daughter and I'd meant to research scholarships for most of a year. Not deprioritized it. Forgotten it, over and over, which is a different failure.
Fifteen minutes, three times a week. Some weeks it slides to Thursday and Friday and Sunday, and that's fine — there's no day it was supposed to be.
A month in I've got more than I'd have gotten from a weekend I was never going to spend on it. The thing I was missing wasn't time or willpower. It was a claim on my attention small enough that I'd actually honor it.
Your stack keeps a record. Every time you complete a strop it lands on the grid — a running count of what you've actually done.
Unlimited chops. Ten strops.
Unlimited everything.
No trial, no countdown. Use the free tier as long as you like.
That's Strop.
Chop wood, carry water. The mundane necessary labor that doesn't get skipped and doesn't transform you. It has a date because someone else set one.
Not a grindstone. A strop doesn't grind a new edge — it brings back the one already in the blade. Small repeated passes, none of them the pass that did it, until one day it's razor sharp and you wonder when that happened.
Hit your rate for the week and you didn't complete it or check it off. You stropped it.
© 2026 Strop