Promethee turns your working hours into a game

Promethee is a focus-tracking desktop app for Mac and Windows, and its pitch is simple: treat your working hours like a game. You run deep work sessions and the app rewards them with XP. You try to keep your streak alive. There is a weekly leaderboard to climb, and a community feed where people share what they are building. The line at the top of Promethee's site is "Join the hardest-working people on earth", which tells you exactly who they have in mind.

The idea comes from Nicolas, Promethee's CEO, and what caught my attention is how fully he has committed to the game side of it. Builders who use the app can join guilds. Part of the appeal is checking each week whether you have landed on a leaderboard. Guilds and rankings are things I associate with games, not with software that counts your hours at a desk, and seeing them used for focus time is a neat bit of borrowing.

I should own my bias here. I like games and I like building things, so I am more or less the person this was made for. For people like me, turning the working day into something with points and a weekly table is quite a cool idea. It takes a part of work that is usually invisible, the hours you put in quietly, and gives it a score and an audience.

This is a first reaction based on what is on their site, so I will not pretend to know more than that. I have not dug into how the XP is calculated or how the guilds work in practice.

If you run a small business and you are the kind of person who works better with a score to chase, it is an easy thing to try on your own hours. If points and leaderboards leave you cold, this one probably is not for you, and that is fine.