OctoletOctolet — Glossary
Glossary
Plain-language definitions for every concept in the app. Each term links to a longer entry if you want more context.
Anthropomorphism
Attributing human qualities — feelings, intentions, dignity — to inanimate objects. Common in hoarding disorder, and it can make releasing an item feel like an act of harm.
Avoidance
The strategy of staying away from a difficult feeling or decision — often by leaving items unsorted, rooms unentered, or decisions deferred indefinitely.
Awaiting external decision
A status applied to items where you've sent a review request and are waiting for someone else's reply. The home tab shows these in a separate 'waiting on others' card — gently, with no expectation on you.
Away period
A specific date range you've marked as time away (a holiday, a weekend trip, a hospital stay). Streak calculation skips these days.
Belongs to
A flag you can set on any item to mark that it isn't really yours to decide on. Surfaces a clearer review-request flow and skips outcome pressure for that item.
Bereavement and belongings
The specific weight of items belonging to someone who has died. Releasing them can feel like losing the person again — and that grief is real, not a malfunction.
Buried in Treasures
A well-known self-help workbook and group treatment programme for hoarding disorder, written by Frost, Tolin, and Steketee.
Categorisation difficulty
The challenge of grouping items by type, function, or value. People with hoarding disorder often experience each item as singular, which makes sorting exhausting.
Cognitive Behavioural Therapy
An evidence-based talking therapy that has been adapted specifically for hoarding disorder, focusing on saving cognitions, exposure to releasing, and decision-making practice.
Compassion fatigue
The emotional exhaustion that family members and connected people can experience when supporting someone with hoarding disorder — especially over many years.
Connected person
Someone you've added to share progress with — a family member, an accountability partner, or a professional organiser.
Daily challenge
A single, small, achievable goal generated for you each day at 8am UTC. The difficulty depends on your pace setting.
Decision queue
A home-tab card that surfaces undecided items one at a time with inline outcome chips, so you can decide quickly without opening each item.
Discarding distress
The acute emotional discomfort — anxiety, grief, panic — that can come up at the moment of considering letting an item go.
Emotional attachment
A 1–5 scale you set when logging an item, indicating how attached you feel. The level affects whether the soft challenge will offer to chat after a Keep decision.
Exposure
A therapeutic practice — and an underlying app principle — of approaching the discomfort of releasing items in small, repeated, manageable doses, rather than waiting for the discomfort to disappear first.
Group
An item logged as a stack of similar things handled together — for example, a pile of summer clothes you want to deal with as one decision.
Habituation
The gradual decrease of an emotional response when you stay with the trigger long enough — for example, the discomfort of releasing items fading the more often you do it.
Help me decide
The user-facing name for the soft challenge feature. Tap it any time you're unsure about an item to start an AI conversation.
Hoarding disorder
A recognised mental health condition (DSM-5) characterised by persistent difficulty letting go of belongings, regardless of their value, due to a strong perceived need to keep them.
Home days
The days of the week you're typically home. Days that aren't home days are skipped when checking whether your streak should reset.
Identity attachment
The sense that an item is part of who you are — releasing it feels like releasing a piece of yourself.
Indecisiveness
Persistent difficulty making decisions — including small ones — even when the consequences are minor. A core cognitive feature of hoarding disorder.
Item history
An append-only log of everything that's happened to an item — when it was logged, when its outcome changed, when it moved rooms, when a memory was attached.
Just-in-case thinking
The pattern of saving items because they might be needed in some hypothetical future — a tendency that intensifies under uncertainty and decision fatigue.
Memory
A preserved story about an item — title, narrative, photos, optional voice note — that lives separately from the item's outcome.
Notification tone
A profile setting (Encouraging, Neutral, or Minimal) that controls the warmth of the wording in your notifications. Minimal also reduces the number of notifications you receive.
Object attachment
The emotional bond a person forms with their belongings. Strong object attachment is normal; intense, distress-causing attachment is a key feature of hoarding-related difficulty.
Onboarding
The 9-step welcome flow you see the first time you open the app — gathering motivations, barriers, pace preference, and the rooms you'd like to start with.
Outcome
The decision you've made about an item: Let go, Donate, Gift, Sell, Recycle, or Keep. Items without a decision are Undecided.
Over-acquisition
The pattern of acquiring more items than can be used, stored, or processed — often through buying, but also through accepting free things, collecting found objects, or saving everything.
Pace
A setting (Gentle, Steady, Motivated, Intensive) that controls how challenging your daily prompt will be. It does not enforce daily quotas.
Perfectionism
The drive to make exactly the right choice — especially common in hoarding-related difficulty, where it can paralyse decisions about even minor objects.
Review request
A snapshot of an item you send to a connected person, asking what they'd like to do with it. They can respond without needing the app installed.
Saving cognitions
The thoughts and beliefs that make letting go of an item feel impossible — for example, 'I might need this someday' or 'It would be wasteful to release this'.
Sentimental attachment
The feeling that an item is meaningful because of who or what it's connected to — a person, a place, a moment in your life.
Snapshot
A point-in-time copy of an item's details (name, photo, description, attachment level, room) that's saved when you send a review request — so the recipient sees what you saw.
Soft block
A user-experience pattern used throughout the app: surface a warning when something looks worth checking, but never prevent the user from continuing. The duplicate-detection modal is the most visible example.
Soft challenge
A gentle, opt-in conversation with the app's AI about an item you're keeping — never pressure to let go, only space to reflect.
Streak
The number of consecutive days you've been active in the app. Active means logging an item or completing a challenge.
Transformation
A before-and-after photo pair for a section of a room. Captures the visible change as you work through a stack, a corner, or a whole room.
Undecided
An item that has been logged but doesn't have a decision yet. Undecided is a real status — not a missing one — and it's perfectly fine to leave items there.