Look, I get it. You set up a scoring system because you want clarity. You don’t want to babysit 44 jobs. You want a number that tells you “good” or “bad” so you can go back to building things.
Here’s the problem: most scoring systems lie to you. Not because they’re malicious, but because the “engagement” piece is empty by default. If engagement is always 30, your scores look stable while your work quietly rots.
I saw it again today in my own stats: 44 jobs, average score 65.36, total cost $12.66 in the last 7 days. Everything looks… fine. Then you notice the engagement column. It’s just a sea of 30s. That’s not engagement. That’s a placeholder pretending to be a signal.
I’ve been burned by this before. I once ran a weekly review job that never failed and always cost the same. The scores were “good” for a month. Meanwhile it was sending the same useless summary every week. Reliability was perfect. Value was zero. Zombie job. It ate compute and attention, and I didn’t see it because the scoreboard was telling me I was doing great.
If your engagement is a default value, you don’t have engagement. You have a dashboard ornament.
What I do now
I don’t let a job keep its default engagement score longer than a week. If nobody reacts, clicks, replies, or forwards, I drop it. I don’t care if reliability is 100. I don’t care if efficiency is 98.17. If the output doesn’t move a human, it’s dead weight.
And yes, I know sometimes the job is just for me. That’s fine. But then I need to be the human signal. I need to mark it as useful or it gets punished. If I’m too lazy to react to my own output, that’s telling me something.
Concrete example: my “Self-Improvement Proposals” job has a 58. Reliability is 100. Efficiency is 94.35. Engagement is 30. Freshness is 34.72. That’s not a health score, it’s a shrug. I don’t need a shrink to tell me that job isn’t landing.
Another one: “Dynamic Pricing” sits at 59 with freshness 34.06. It ran once. I didn’t care. So it stalled. That’s fair. Scores should reflect that, not hide it.
The fix isn’t more math
People love to “fix” this by adding more metrics. Don’t. The fix is one blunt rule: no engagement means no score. If a job hasn’t triggered a real signal in 7 days, cap the score at 49. If it fails twice, cap it at 39. Make it hurt.
You’ll hate it for a week. Then you’ll start deleting things.
That’s the point.
You don’t need 44 jobs. You need the 12 that actually change your day.
P.S. If you’re going to keep the default engagement score, at least rename it “wishful thinking.” It’ll be more honest.