Connection Habits Audit

Five inputs produce the whole output. Average days between contact gives the number of touches in a week: a two-day gap means roughly four touches, since 7 days divided by 2 days is 3.5 and that rounds to 4. Uninterrupted time together, shared meals and settling time after a disagreement add up to the time-together total, which in the example is 13.5 hours. Shared sleep is added separately because it is a setting rather than a choice, and it is worth seeing how much of a week two people spend in the same room at night.

Several things are deliberately outside the tool. There is no overall score, because a single number invites the comparison the tool exists to prevent. There is no reading of who initiates more, because the difference between a partner who texts first and a partner who never texts at all depends on reasons you cannot type into a form. There is no prediction of anything either. The output is a description of what you entered, which means it is only as good as the honesty of the week you entered.

• Contact touches are counted, quality blocks are counted, and repair episodes are counted as one per week when any settling time was logged.
• A quality block is an unbroken stretch of at least one hour, so 3.5 hours reads as 3 blocks averaging 1.2 hours each.
• Solo time is the remainder of 168 hours after contact, together time and shared sleep.
• Nothing here is compared against a norm for other couples, because the norms do not exist.

The split usually looks harsh on paper. In the example week, initiated contact takes 1.0 hour, time together takes 13.5 hours, shared sleep is zero, and solo time takes 153.5 hours, which is 91.4% of the week. That last number is not a verdict on anything. Two adults working full time, commuting, sleeping apart on work nights and seeing friends will produce a large solo share no matter how warm the relationship is, because 168 hours is a lot of hours.

The useful reading is about the shape rather than the size. Contact that makes up under 2% of the week means the connection lives almost entirely in shared hours, so a small number of extra shared hours moves the number more than a large number of extra messages. Shared sleep does the same thing at a larger scale, which is why the tool lists it separately rather than folding it into time together.

• Initiated contact covers anything that starts a conversation and gets a response.
• Time together covers quality time, shared meals and the hours spent settling a disagreement.
• Shared sleep counts seven nights at 7.5 hours each when the two of you share sleep.
• Solo time is the leftover, and it is normally the largest bar in the chart.

The tool ends with three moves of 15 minutes each, and the reason for that size is practical. Half an hour is long enough to feel like an event and short enough to survive a bad week. When contact occupies under 2% of the week, the first action is to protect one screen-free window, because fifteen minutes of shared attention on three days adds more than a week of back-and-forth messages. When shared meals sit below five, the second action adds a sitting rather than a meal, which avoids the extra shopping and cooking that usually kills the idea.

When settling after a disagreement takes six hours or more, the third action is a fixed check-in rule inside the first hour. The point is not to shorten feelings, it is to stop the silence from becoming the default, because a fifteen-minute ritual survives a tired evening in a way that a full conversation about the evening does not. If none of the conditions trigger, the fallback question round keeps the action in the same size range.

• Every action is small enough to do on a week when nothing else goes right.
• Log the same fields seven days later and compare rows of facts, not impressions.
• Change one variable at a time, otherwise you cannot tell which move produced the change.
• Two weeks is the minimum useful sample; anything more needs a real habit and a real reason.