Habits

A habit is something you mean to do again and again. Margin tracks whether you did it, and leaves how you felt about it to you.

Set one up#

A habit has a name, an icon and a color, then two settings that decide how it is counted: how often, and a target. The icon is one of The Margin's own drawings, with a target as the default, or an emoji you type yourself.

So "Every day" is daily with a target of one, "3× a day" wants three check-ins before the day fills in, and "3× a week" is kept by any three days that week.

Check in#

Check off the habit on the Habits page. Under the list, the This week grid shows every habit against Monday to Sunday, and you can tap any day in it to log it, which covers the evening you did it and forgot to say so.

The dashboard shows how many of today's habits are done.

A daily reminder#

Press the bell on a habit and pick a time. Every day at that time The Margin sends you a reminder: a notification in the app and, where push is on, on your phone, whichever device you set it on. A day you have already checked in is skipped. The time is kept in the time zone you set it in, so 8:00 AM stays 8:00 AM across daylight saving. Pick the time again, or No reminder, to change or stop it.

On the phone, open the habit and choose a time under Remind me. An assistant connected over MCP can set one with update_habit (reminder_time, reminder_timezone) or stop it with clear_reminder.

Reading the history#

Three readings of the same check-ins

Streak

the current run and your longest, counted in the habit's own unit, days or weeks. Today, or the week in progress, never breaks it. Only a missed day or week that is already over does.

Last fourteen days

a row of bars on each habit card on wider screens. A bar's height shows partial progress, so "2 of 3" looks different from nothing.

Activity

open a habit for 26 weeks of squares, one per day, with the completion rate beside it and its working shown ("3/7 weeks").

The squares are the view worth opening. A streak turns one missed Tuesday into a zero. Six months of squares shows a half-year that is mostly filled in, which is closer to what happened.

Accountability partners#

Partners are set per habit. Open the habit and choose Add Partners under Accountability. A partner sees how that one habit is going. They see nothing else in your workspace.

It is scoped to the habit on purpose. Handing someone your whole workspace so they can check you went running would be surveillance with a friendly name.

What a partner hears#

Each partner has two switches for each habit, and both start on.

• Celebrate streaks. When your run reaches the milestone they picked (every 3, 7, 14, 21 or 30 days), they get a note such as "Sam hit a 14-day streak on Read". A run of 30, 100 or 365 days is always marked, whatever the setting. For a weekly habit the run counts in weeks, so "every 7 days" means every week and "every 21 days" means every third week.
• Notify on missed days. When a daily habit's previous day ended without its target, they hear about it the next morning, with what did get logged ("ended at 1 of 2"). A weekly habit is judged once the Monday-to-Sunday week is over.

In the phone app, the switches and the milestone are in the habit's share sheet, under each person it is shared with.

These arrive in the bell and, where push is on, on their phone. A few rules keep them fair:

• Days are your days. "Yesterday" is counted in your time zone: the one set in Settings, else the one your reminder was set in, else UTC.
• Nothing arrives while your partner is likely asleep. Notes wait for 8 AM to 9 PM in their time zone.
• Each one is sent once, however many times the check runs.
• Missed-day notes stop when the habit has had nothing logged for a week (four weeks for a weekly habit), so a habit you have put down does not nag anyone. They start again with your next check-in.
• A partner hears nothing about days before they were added, and nothing at all about an archived habit.

The habits you are a partner on are listed under You're a partner on at the foot of the Habits page, each with the owner's last seven days and their current streak, in the phone app as well as on the web. Tapping a streak or missed-day note opens that list with its habit first. Only the owner can tick their habit.

In a family workspace#

The family page has a Habits together card. It lists the habits the household shares and how many people have done each one today, so "everyone reads before bed" is tracked as one thing rather than five private streaks. See Family.

Limits#

Free allows 10 habits per workspace. The paid plans do not cap them.