KPI & Coffee

Your inbox has nine hours of work in it and you have four minutes.

Every card that lands wants something. A bug, a stakeholder with a feeling, a meeting that exists to schedule another meeting. You have four answers and no time to think about which one to use:

DO IT MYSELF — fast, clean, costs your sanity.
DELEGATE — to the right person, or to whoever is free and hope.
BACKLOG — it comes back angrier.
NOPE — saying no is a real answer, and cheap work is cheap to refuse.

The madness meter fills with the clutter, not with the difficulty. Cards you haven't looked at cost you more than cards you got wrong. Get to Inbox Zero and everything you ship for the next eight seconds counts double. Hit 100 and the desktop opens a dialog about it.

A week, not a day

Five weekdays, each one adding exactly one thing and nothing else.

• Monday — the job.
• Tuesday — lunch. People go offline and the work doesn't.
• Wednesday — incidents detonate, and take the cards next to them.
• Thursday — someone's out sick. The two who came in cover, and burn.
• Friday — release day, and someone leaves gift cards on the desk.

Survive Friday and you've beaten the week. Then the game offers you Saturday.

Saturday is on call. Sunday, nobody answers — and Sunday never ends: past 18:00 the day just keeps going and the work compounds. There's a clock-out.exe window offering you the door. Ignoring it is a choice.

Things that are true about this game

• Nothing here is a lecture. The mechanics are the lesson and they never explain themselves twice.
• Pause is free, unlimited, and it is reading mode. The clock, the fuses and your team all freeze. The jokes are meant to be read.
• Five difficulty rungs, picked by you and visible. No hidden rubber band.
• Your best day is drawn on the taskbar while you play the next one, quietly, with no move to make about it.
• Nobody gets told off. Not by the coach, not by the score screen, not when you lose at 96% of the day.

The one honest warning

You are going to lose the first few. The day is tuned so that a good run ends somewhere just short of six o'clock. That near miss is the game.

Desktop only — it is a mouse-and-drag game and there is no touch support yet. Made with Phaser 4. Plays in the browser. Headphones recommended — the music gets faster as you come apart.