Three is an odd number for an app. It isn’t one, which would be tidier to count and easier to explain. It isn’t five or ten, which would sound more serious. Three looks like it was picked by eye.
It wasn’t, entirely, so here’s the reasoning.
One card says nothing
The trouble with a single card a day is that it has nothing to be compared against.
You write “door”. And now what? It might be the theme that’s been circling you for weeks, or you might have just heard your neighbour’s. One loose association can’t tell the difference between what you brought with you and what happened to be in the room. It’s noise in the shape of data.
With two there’s something. With three, in the same sitting and the same mood, you start to see whether there’s a thread or whether each one went its own way. It isn’t a measurement — it’s that you notice it yourself while writing the third. Sometimes you think “that again”, and that sentence is more informative than any chart.
Ten is homework
Going up, the limit is set by honesty rather than time.
The first answers come out on their own. From the fourth or fifth you start producing: you’ve emptied what was within reach and you go looking, and looking is precisely the operation the game is trying to sidestep. What comes out then is considered, well phrased, and useless for any of this.
There’s also the boring problem: ten cards take a while, a while is a slot in your day, and a slot in your day is the thing you skip on the first busy one. Naipa is played in the supermarket queue. If it stops fitting there, it stops being played.
Three a day is twenty-one a week
The number had to work upwards too, on the scale where things do get counted.
Three a day is twenty-one notes a week. That’s too few to draw conclusions from a single week — another post is about exactly that — but it’s enough that after a month there are nearly ninety, and at that point repetitions stop being coincidence. At one card a day you’d have thirty, and you’d be waiting a quarter to get to the same place.
And the deck lasts
There’s one last side effect we liked once we did the arithmetic.
The deck is seventy cards, dealt without repeats until it runs out. At three a day that’s about twenty-three days: nearly a month before a card comes round again.
That’s plenty of time to forget what you answered last time. And it matters, because the day you recognise a card and remember your answer, you’re no longer associating freely — you’re correcting yourself.
Which is why, when a card does come back around, Naipa shows you what you wrote the last time it came up — after you’ve written, never before. What you said then is worth seeing next to what you said now; handing it to you while the sixty seconds are running would only turn today’s answer into a reply to your own.
Three, then, isn’t a round number. It’s where “this is quick” and “this adds up to something” cross.