Every logged night gets one number from 0 to 100. It exists to answer one question: was last night better or worse than the nights around it?
It is not a grade, and it is not a comparison against other babies. It is a summary of five things you already logged, put on a single scale so a week of nights can be read at a glance.
The five parts
The score is the plain average of five sub-scores, each also out of 100. No part counts for more than any other.
Night sleep. How much your baby slept overnight, measured against a goal of about 11 hours. Nine hours against an 11 hour goal scores around 82. This is usually the steadiest of the five.
Longest stretch. The single longest unbroken block of sleep, measured against a goal of about 6 hours. Two 3 hour stretches and one 6 hour stretch add up to the same total sleep, and they are not the same night. This is the part that tends to move first when a plan starts working.
Few night wakes. Starts at 100 and loses 20 points per wake. Five wakes takes it to zero. It is the harshest of the five on purpose, because wake count is what most families are trying to change.
Low crying. Full marks for up to about 10 minutes of crying across the night, then 2 points off for every extra minute and a half. Thirty minutes of crying lands near 73.
Fell asleep fast. The time between being put down and actually falling asleep. Full marks within about 10 minutes, then 1.5 points off per minute after that. An hour of settling takes this part down to about 25.
Ten hours of night sleep with a five hour stretch, two wakes, ten minutes of crying and fifteen minutes to settle averages out in the mid 80s. Perfect hundreds are rare, and they are not the point.
Why one night tells you almost nothing
A single score moves for reasons that have nothing to do with your plan. Teeth. A cold. A late nap. A visitor. A wake you forgot to log. Any one of those can take twenty points off a night that was otherwise fine.
Read the 7 day and 14 day views instead.
- The 7 day view is the working number. It absorbs one bad night and still reacts within a week, which is roughly how fast a change to your routine shows up.
- The 14 day view is the honest one. It tells you whether the last fortnight was genuinely better than the one before, rather than whether last night felt better.
A good habit is to check the score in the morning and then ignore it until the weekly view moves. If the 7 day line is flat but the 14 day line is climbing, you are making slow progress. If both are flat after two consistent weeks, the plan is worth a look rather than more patience.
Reading the charts
The Charts tab gives you the score two ways, plus the raw numbers behind it.
Sleep score over time is a line, one point per night, on a 0 to 100 axis. You can switch the range between 1, 2, 5, 7 and 14 days. Look at the slope, not the last point.
The breakdown shows the five sub-scores across the range you picked, each with a short line explaining how it is worked out. When the total drops, this is where you find out which of the five did it. Two bad settle scores and four steady ones is a very different problem from five nights of heavy crying.
The daily trends are your raw logs as bars: night sleep, total sleep, time in crib, naps, night wakes, crying minutes, feeds, and time to fall asleep. Once the breakdown tells you which part slipped, the matching bar chart tells you by how much and on which nights.
The 24 hour sleep clock draws the most recent night and its naps as a ring. It is the fastest way to see whether the day is shaped the way you meant it to be.
The goals behind the score
The goals the score measures against belong to your baby, not to a fixed standard. Out of the box they are about 11 hours of night sleep, one 6 hour unbroken stretch, no night wakes, and under 10 minutes of crying in total.
Those defaults are deliberately ambitious, which is why a score in the 60s or 70s is a normal night rather than a bad one. So watch your own trend rather than the absolute value. A steady climb from 55 to 68 over two weeks is the result you are looking for. Whether 68 would be a good score for somebody else's baby does not matter.
You can also change the goals themselves. Under Settings, Your targets lets you set the night sleep goal, the longest stretch goal, how many wakes still count as a good night, and how many crying minutes are tolerated before they count against the score. The score then measures the night against what a good night means for your family, not against a default.
What to do with a bad score
Open the breakdown before you change anything. Most of the time one sub-score is doing the damage, and the fix follows from which one it is.
- Low night sleep with a fine longest stretch usually means bedtime or morning wake time, not night wakes.
- A low longest stretch with few wakes usually means the wakes you did have landed badly, often around a feed.
- A low fell asleep fast score is nearly always a timing problem. Wake windows by age is the place to start.
- A low low crying score on a night that otherwise looked fine is worth checking against your logs first, since crying minutes are the field people most often leave blank.
If the crying field is the one you keep skipping, how to log night wakes covers doing it in two taps. For the whole picture, how it works walks through a full day and night.