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How it works

You do not sign up for a course. You do not pay anything. You just use dooer the normal way, and dooer keeps score.

Points

When you complete a task, dooer gives you points.

  • Quick task (no full brief) → +5 points.
  • Full-brief task (you wrote a real brief before starting) → +10 points.

The reason a full brief is worth twice as much is that writing a brief forces you to think before you act. That is the single most expensive thing you can learn to do as a project person. dooer rewards it on purpose.

Points are stored on your user profile (dooer_points). You can see them on your profile and they appear on top of you in the gamification widgets.

What just happened when you completed your first task

  1. The task's status changed from In Progress to Complete.
  2. The current date and time got stamped on the task as completed_at.
  3. Your dooer_points went up by 5 or 10.
  4. The person who first assigned you the task got a notification.
  5. A row was added to the audit log.

That is the basic causality pattern. Every meaningful action in dooer triggers something else. The academy teaches you to see those triggers.

Levels

When your points cross a threshold, you move to a new level. The level slugs are:

no_level → novice → journeyman → expert → (higher levels coming)

Levels are not the same as tiers. Levels are a smoothed measure of how much you have done. Tiers are a measure of how well you can do it.

When you level up, two things happen:

  1. A modal pops up in the app to tell you.
  2. An email goes out.

dooer is careful not to send that email twice if you complete two tasks at the same time. (If you are curious, there is an atomic database claim that protects against the race condition. The pattern is called "compare-and-swap." It is what makes the side-effect safe.)

Tiers

A tier is your skill level on the track you picked. There are three:

Tier What it means Typical time
Basic You can do the basic moves. You stop losing work. Week 1–4
Advanced You see patterns across tasks, projects, meetings. You plan a week deliberately. Month 2–4
Proficient You read the whole system. You instrument cadence. You can teach others. Month 5+

Each tier has an exit criterion. The criterion is built from things dooer can actually measure about your behaviour — not a quiz.

For example, the Solo Basic exit criterion is:

  • You have completed at least 10 tasks.
  • Your unread notification count stays under 5 on average.

These two signals tell dooer that you are using the tool every day and not letting work pile up.

When you hit the criterion, dooer surfaces a "ready for Advanced" prompt. You do not have to take it. The point of the tier is to make sure the muscle is real before you load it more.

Where the model comes from

The three tiers come from a real research model called the Dreyfus model of skill acquisition (Dreyfus & Dreyfus, 1980). The original model has five stages — novice, advanced beginner, competent, proficient, expert — and was developed at UC Berkeley to describe how chess players, pilots, and surgeons get good at their craft.

We collapsed five stages into three so the academy stays usable. The mapping is:

  • Basic = Novice + Advanced Beginner.
  • Advanced = Competent.
  • Proficient = Proficient + Expert.

If you want to go deeper, see the Core concepts section.

What dooer is not measuring

Some things matter a lot but dooer cannot see them:

  • Whether the task was actually worth doing.
  • Whether the brief was good or just long.
  • Whether your team trusts you.
  • Whether you are getting better at the thinking part of project work.

The academy lessons are the part that fills in those gaps. The points and levels and tiers are scaffolding. The real learning happens when you read the lesson, do the journey inside the app, and notice the side-effects.

Now pick a track