There's what you need to do — bills, appointments, deadlines. There's the person you want to be — present, organized, there for family and friends. Strop handles both, in a morning ritual that takes about a minute.
To do: Pay the electric bill,
renew the registration, book the dentist...all of the daily hoops
you jump through.
We call these actions chops.
Bounded by a date — an exact one, every Tuesday, the 2nd of the month.
To be: someone who eats well.
Someone who exercises. Someone who shows up for family and
friends, who makes time for their kids. Someone who learns, grows,
builds skills and develops their talents...the things that so many
of us aspire to.
Every one of those identities is composed of a discrete set of
actions that we call strops.
Bounded by a rate — every day, three times a week, once a month.
Someone who eats well, exercises, is organized, is there for friends and family...is someone who consistently performs a set of small actions in these respective areas. We call these actions strops. See some examples below
I wasn't practicing and was stuck on the idea that if I wasn't playing 2 hours a day I'd make no progress. I decided to try something smaller instead. Four strops: sight reading, ear training, and key signatures drilled through a few apps, five minutes each, plus ten minutes learning the notes on the fretboard. All three times a week. Every morning I'd clear Today and let Plan guide me toward adding a few of these alongside everything else. I never missed one — a few minutes, three times a week, so easy to hit.
A few weeks in, the progress caught me off guard. Before long I'd worked through every drill. Years of not sticking with this, and it turned out the problem was never the time. It was just consistency.
When I started using Strop, I added just two strops: a piece of fruit, three times a week, and a serving of vegetables, twice a week. Five minutes each, and I never missed them. It was so easy that I bumped them both to 5x a week.
I soon rode the momentum straight into more: kefir five times a week, a fermented food five times a week, a real breakfast five times a week. All five or ten minutes each. I've stuck this for months, and I've lost 20 lbs. This isn't being on a "diet", it's just eating ridiculously better. I just needed something to consistently shine a little attention on habits that small.
I've had a plan to gather a bunch of info on scholarships for one of my kids who's edging up on college. Every week it fell through the cracks.
So I created a strop named Research Scholarships: fifteen minutes, three times a week. Sometimes I add it to Today and it doesn't get done, but since I can be flexible on when I do it, and since it's small, I end up getting it done every week.
A month in, I'm amazed at how much great info I've collected, and it feels great to be on top of this.
Strop intelligently prioritizes your Chops and Strops into a flexible daily schedule that keeps your focus trained on the actions that build your life.
Once every morning. About a minute, start to finish.
Every day starts blank. Yesterday's list doesn't roll over, doesn't accumulate, and doesn't sit there in red waiting to be explained. It's just gone.
The app lays out everything you've got — chops by when they're due, strops by how they're pacing against their rate. Then you pick. Nothing is scheduled for you and nothing is chosen for you. You're the one who knows what today is going to be like.
One item on the screen. A timer if you want one. Nothing else visible, nothing else to look at, no list to stare at instead of starting. This is the part most apps leave you to do alone.
Five minutes, three times a week, is easy to shrug off on its own. Here's what three of them look like running at once.
That's not a fluke. That's a life moving somewhere.
Subscribe for unlimited chops and strops.
Chops, strops, today. That's the whole app.
Not a grindstone. A strop doesn't grind a new edge — it brings back the one that's already in the blade. Small repeated passes, none of them the pass that did it, until one day it's razor sharp and you think: when did that happen?
That's the ten minutes on the fretboard, the UNO game on a Tuesday, the kind word on a hard day. Hit your rate for the week and you didn't complete it or check it off. You stropped it.