How Rolyx works

If you do nothing else, do these four things in order:

1. Name your roles. Settings → Roles. The five you start with are a guess; make them yours and put them in the order that matters. More
2. Fill today, once. On Today, take on one large task, three mediums and five smalls. Do it badly the first time - the sizes only make sense once you've mis-sized a few. More
3. Add one habit. One. Give it a target and a floor, and let it stage for three weeks before you add another. More
4. Book the weekly review. Settings → Weekly Review. Everything above degrades into a to-do list without it. More

The rest - projects, notebooks, someday, monthly and quarterly reviews - can wait until you miss them.

A role is a part of your life you're accountable to: Parent, Employee, Friend. Every task, habit and project belongs to exactly one, which is what stops the system from becoming a flat list where work quietly eats everything else.

Roles are ranked, and the order is a real statement - it's the order they're listed in, and the order the review walks them in. One role is your default, pre-selected whenever you add something new.

Archive a role you're not living right now; its history stays and it stops appearing in pickers. Delete only works once nothing points at it. Both live in Settings → Roles.

A day has nine slots, in three sizes:

• Large ×1 90-120+ min
• Medium ×3 30-60 min
• Small ×5 <15 min

Sizing is by weight, not importance - how much of you it takes to do. The caps exist because a day genuinely holds about one hard thing, and a list that pretends otherwise is how you end each day behind.

The caps are a ceiling, not a quota. Finishing three smalls on a day where three smalls is all that existed is a finished day; the app says so rather than asking you to invent a fourth. Going over is allowed too - assign two larges if you mean it.

A completed task keeps its slot for the day. Capacity is what you took on, not what's left outstanding, so doing your one large task doesn't immediately ask for another. An empty slot offers you candidates: overdue work first, then the undated backlog, then a pointer at Someday if a size has genuinely run dry.

To swap something out of a slot, use ↩ Backlog on the row: it takes the task off the date and leaves it undated, ready to be pulled onto another day. The × beside it is a real delete, so it asks once - press it and it becomes "Delete?", which is the press that counts.

Tasks can repeat - on fixed dates (every Monday, the 3rd of the month), floating from completion (every 10 days, whenever you last did it), or as a frequency: "once a week", left unplaced in a pool until the weekly review puts it on a day.

A repeat isn't only a capture-time decision: ✎ on any task row adds, changes or removes one later. That's how a line triaged out of the inbox - which always arrives undated and one-off - becomes the weekly thing it turned out to be.

The add box on Today decides where a line lands by how much you tell it. Type a bare title and hit enter: it's a capture, and it drops into that day's inbox, unsorted and un-guessed-at. Touch any detail - role, size, due date, project, link, repeat - and you've said you mean a task, at which point role and size are both required.

That's the whole rule, and it exists so that thinking and sorting stay separate. Nothing is ever silently stamped with a default role and a size you didn't choose.

The inbox is emptied in the weekly review, one line at a time, into a task, a project, a note, or the bin.

The incubator: things you might do, held deliberately without a size and without a date. A someday item isn't backlog - the backlog is work you've committed to and just haven't scheduled. Someday is work you haven't agreed to yet.

The only way out is to commit: give it a size, optionally a date, and it becomes an ordinary task. Tasks and projects can both incubate.

Every task is in exactly one of six places, and each of them is a different screen: it's overdue, it's scheduled on a day, it's in the backlog (committed to, undated), it's in a repeat's pool waiting to be placed, it's someday, or it's done.

Tasks is the one screen that shows all six at once. Search it by title - words match in any order, so "bank call" finds "Call the bank" - and the heading over each result tells you which of the six it's sitting in. Anything you find there can be completed, edited or rescheduled without leaving the page.

Notes aren't searched here; they have their own search, over titles and bodies, on the Notes page.

A project is an outcome, not a task list: a statement of what "done" looks like, with a due date and a role. Tasks are then assigned to it.

Every review checks which outcomes are due before the next one and flags the ones with nothing moving. That flag is the entire reason projects exist as their own thing.

A habit is one activity with two numbers per week (or per month), not two habits:

• Target - the good week. What you're aiming at.
• Floor - the week you refuse to go below. Non-negotiable, and deliberately low enough to hold on your worst week.

Workout, target 5×, floor 3×. Missing target is information. Missing floor is the thing the system actually watches: the weekly review reports floor misses, tells the difference between one, two in a row, and a pattern, and lets you attach a reason to a miss - "away all week" is a different fact from a bare miss, and it's the one thing the diagnostic can't see for itself.

A habit only answers for periods that closed after you created it, so setting up five habits on a Friday doesn't greet you with a month of failures you were never there for.

One habit stages at a time, for three weeks, across the whole system. A staging habit is one you're still installing; a solidified one is load-bearing and expected to just hold.

The rule is the point. Adding six habits in one enthusiastic evening is the reliable way to hold none of them, so the app won't let a second habit stage while one is mid-window. Let the three weeks run, solidify it, then start the next.

Notes live in notebooks and are written in Markdown. A note can be attached to a task, which is where the thinking behind a piece of work goes.

Unfiled is a real destination, not a failure state - getting a thought out of your head and into a note has already done the important part. If you'd rather nothing sat there, Settings → Weekly Review adds a filing step to the ritual.

The weekly review is the load-bearing habit of the whole system, and it's a forward-looking ritual - you sit down at the end of one week to lay out the next. It walks six steps:

1. Clear Inbox - every captured line, sorted into something or binned.
2. File Notes - optional; only if you turned it on.
3. Last Week - what got done, and what's still open from it.
4. Role & Habit Check - every role in turn: is anything moving here? Plus every floor, met or missed.
5. Plan the Week - place next week's work onto days.
6. Lock It In.

A role with nothing in it isn't automatically a failure - you can mark it an intentional pause for that period, which is the difference between a decision and an oversight. The pause is scoped to the period, so it doesn't quietly persist into next week.

Monthly and quarterly reviews run the same shape over a longer horizon. All three can remind you on a schedule - Settings. None of them are on by default.

System Pause is for a genuinely disrupted stretch - illness, a newborn, a move. While it's on, the 1-3-5 suspends entirely and the only obligation left standing is the habit floor. It's one global switch, it says why, and it ends at your next weekly review or whenever you end it.

It exists so that a bad fortnight is something you declare rather than something you fail. Use it.

Everything is stored in this browser and the app needs no account at all - that's the default, and it's a complete install, not a trial.

Signing in adds a synced copy so the same data shows up on your other devices. It's magic-link only: an email with a one-time link, no password to choose or lose. Sync never becomes the owner of your data; local storage stays the source of truth and sync is a second reader of it.

Deleting is meant to be final, and it propagates - a task deleted on your phone is deleted everywhere, not archived. The Reset data button clears this browser only.