Personal baseline

A personal baseline is the reference point Sloane uses to judge whether today's reading, across sleep, recovery, calendar load or telemetry friction, represents a real change for that person or falls within their ordinary range. It is built and maintained separately for each individual, not shared across a team or company.

The baseline is not fixed. It is recalculated continuously, using an exponentially weighted moving average over a trailing 14 to 30 day window, so it naturally adapts as a person's circumstances change, such as a new role, a change in season, or simply life happening.

Using a personal baseline, rather than a population norm, is central to Sloane's positioning as a coach rather than a monitoring tool. It means the system is not asking whether someone matches an external standard, but whether they currently match themselves.

This approach has a practical benefit for accuracy as well as fairness: it reduces false positives caused by naturally different working styles, and it reduces false negatives caused by treating an unusual change, for someone whose normal happens to look demanding on paper, as if it were nothing.