Household dashboards love a big number. Three chores. Twelve items. Eighty-two percent. Each of these is inert on its own, because a figure without a comparison cannot tell you whether to do anything.
Three is fine or three is terrible
Three chores due is unremarkable if the usual number is four and alarming if it is normally zero. The number carries no signal; the relationship to normal does. "Three due, two of them overdue" or "three due, same as last week" are both actionable, and both are barely longer.
So every figure gets a companion
A comparison, a breakdown, or a unit. It is a small rule and it is surprisingly strict in practice — it rules out most of what a dashboard instinctively wants to display, which turns out to be exactly the intent.