Streaks, leaderboards, and two different reasons to do a chore
The NestBoard team · 2026-07-27
The problem with points
When we first built chore tracking, the leaderboard came almost immediately. It felt obvious. Points make things fun, a little rivalry keeps everyone moving, and once you already have a score, ranking is the cheapest thing in the world to add.
It took a while to notice we had conflated two different things: doing the work, and doing more of it than someone else. A seven-year-old with three chores and an eleven-year-old with seven are not in the same race, and no amount of points math fixes that. The younger one loses every week for reasons that have nothing to do with effort.
Streaks are about you
A streak is personal. It says you fed the cat five days running, or you have taken the trash out every Tuesday for three weeks. It measures consistency, not rank.
Streaks work because the relationship they create is between you and the task. You are not racing anyone. The number is a quiet reminder that you kept your word to yourself, and the trash still needs to go out whether or not your sibling did the dishes.
So we put streaks where they cannot become a scoreboard. Check off a chore and the row tells you on the spot that this is a five-day streak. Keep one going and it turns into a badge in your own trophy case at three days, a week, a month, and a hundred days. None of that involves anybody else in the house.
Leaderboards are about rank
A leaderboard is a different kind of motivation. Now you are not only doing your chores, you are aware of how your effort stacks up against everyone else's.
For plenty of households that is exactly the point. A bit of competition makes chore day funnier, and a kid who runs on recognition loves seeing their name at the top. That is why the family leaderboard is switched on out of the box: for most houses it earns its place.
But it does not suit everyone. The kid with fewer assigned tasks feels like they are losing before they start. The one who struggles with executive function reads the board as a weekly reminder that they are behind. The competitive sibling starts negotiating for more tasks just to win.
So it is a setting, not a rule
If ranking is not what your household needs, take the leaderboard off your home screen: Settings, then Dashboard Widgets, then the Leaderboard toggle. The dashboard goes back to the calendar, the agenda, and the chores themselves. It still has a home on the Chores page for anyone who wants to look, but nobody has to walk past it every morning.
Turning it off costs you nothing you have earned. Points keep accruing, badges keep unlocking, and streaks keep counting exactly as they did. The ranking is a view, not the record.
There is a second leaderboard, and that one works the other way around. The National Leaderboard ranks households against other households, and it stays off until an adult in the house deliberately opts in. Even then you appear under a team name rather than your family name, with your city and state and your score, and no member's name is ever published, not even a first name. Anything that leaves the household should be a decision somebody made on purpose.
It is the same choice we made with kid accounts: give households the tools, then get out of the way instead of assuming every family runs the same.
What actually motivates
Most people do not need to beat someone else to feel good about emptying the dishwasher. They need to know it counted.
Streaks say you did it. Leaderboards say you did it better. Both work, on different people, sometimes in the same house. That is why one is only ever about you, and the other is one toggle away from the background.