How Skills Work
Track the hours you invest in becoming who you want to be.
What Are Skills?
Skills in MainQuest represent real-world abilities you are actively developing. Unlike habits (which track daily consistency) or quests (which track task completion), skills track cumulative hours of practice.
The skill system is built on a simple truth: mastery comes from deliberate practice over time. By tracking the hours you invest, MainQuest gives you a concrete picture of where your time is going and how your abilities are growing.
Creating a Skill
Open the Skills screen and create a new skill. Give it a clear, specific name that represents the ability you want to develop:
Free accounts get 1 skill slot; Pro unlocks unlimited skills. Either way, focus on the ones you are actively practicing — a skill with zero logged hours is not helping you track anything. Each skill also carries a lifetime target (100 hours by default, yours to change) that its progress bar fills toward.
Crediting Practice Hours
There is no screen where you type in a number of hours — hours are credited automatically, and only one way: by running a Focus Session linked to the skill. The moment the session ends, its full duration is added — no rounding, no extra step.
The two headline metrics for each skill:
Watching your lifetime hours grow is one of the most motivating aspects of the skill system — and the system marks the milestones for you. Every skill carries a mastery rank keyed to lifetime hours:
The rank badge sits on every skill card, along with how many hours remain to the next rank. And yes — the famous "10,000 hours" is literally implemented: it's Grandmaster. Each skill's own detail page goes deeper still: weekly charts, best week, average session length, consistency percentage, and focus analytics.
Linking Skills to Quests
When you create a quest, you can link it to one relevant skill. That link, on its own, does nothing — simply completing a linked quest credits zero hours to the skill.
What Actually Credits Hours
The link only pays off if you run a Focus Session on that quest — the session's duration, not the act of completing the quest, is what gets credited to the linked skill. A quest like "Build the login page" linked to "React Development" only feeds your skill tracking for the time you actually spent focused on it.
Not every quest needs a linked skill. Quests like "Clean the garage" or "Buy groceries" are productive but may not correspond to a specific skill you are developing. Link skills when the connection is genuine, and remember to actually run a Focus Session on the linked work — the link by itself is just metadata. Habits can link a skill too — focus on a habit with a linked skill and the hours flow the same way.
Your Total Hours
The Skills screen also shows a running total hours figure — your lifetime hours summed across every skill you track, at a glance. It answers the question: "How much total time have I invested in deliberate skill development?"
For a breakdown of where that time went, check each skill's own weekly and lifetime numbers individually — there isn't currently a single combined weekly total or a distribution view across skills, just the per-skill numbers plus this one lifetime sum.
Skills and Focus Sessions
Focus sessions are timed deep-work blocks. Start one from a skill's own card — or focus on a quest or habit that has the skill linked — and the session duration automatically feeds into that skill's logged hours.
This is, in fact, the only way hours currently reach a skill — there is no manual entry screen on either platform. Start a focus session linked to "Spanish," study for 45 minutes, and the skill automatically gains 0.75 hours, no extra step.
Building a Skill Development Strategy
The skill system is most effective when you approach it with intention. Here is how to get the most out of it: