# The Margin documentation

> How The Margin works: boards, notes, planner, habits, money, meals, family and team workspaces, the Mind, the assistant, offline use, integrations and agents over MCP. Written against the running product; each page says when it was last checked.

Every link below is the markdown version of one docs page, generated at build time from the same source as https://themarginapp.com/docs, so the two always match. Add `.md` to any docs URL for the same thing, or ask a page for `text/markdown`.

## Start here

- [What The Margin is](https://themarginapp.com/docs/what-the-margin-is.md): One workspace holding tasks, notes, money, habits, dinner and the people you share them with, plus a Mind that reads across all of it and agents that can operate it.
- [Your first hour](https://themarginapp.com/docs/your-first-hour.md): Sign in, take the short welcome or skip it, install it properly, put real work in, decide about the trial, and let the first sync finish before you go anywhere without signal.
- [Working offline](https://themarginapp.com/docs/working-offline.md): What works with no connection, what deliberately does not, and how conflicts resolve when two devices edited the same thing.

## Doing the work

- [Boards and cards](https://themarginapp.com/docs/boards-and-cards.md): Board, list, calendar and timeline views, saved views across boards, what a card holds, dependencies, custom fields and rules, selecting and acting on many cards with undo, recurrence, WIP limits, sharing, and archiving without losing anything.
- [Planner, Today, and Calendar](https://themarginapp.com/docs/planner-today-and-calendar.md): A week you can drag, cards placed at a time, a priority matrix, a day you plan and close, what you finished counted, and a family calendar with events, repeats, reminders and birthdays.
- [Notes](https://themarginapp.com/docs/notes.md): Markdown that stays markdown, folders and notes in one tree, wikilinks and backlinks, three privacy settings, and an Inbox you clear one keystroke at a time.
- [Whiteboards and Canva](https://themarginapp.com/docs/whiteboards-and-canvases.md): An infinite canvas for sketches, diagrams and ideas that do not fit in a list, and a place to keep the Canva designs you already have.
- [Templates and presets](https://themarginapp.com/docs/templates.md): Write a shape once and use it as a note, a checklist, a card, a whiteboard or a set of habits, and start boards from column presets.
- [Talking instead of typing](https://themarginapp.com/docs/voice.md): Dictate into quick capture and the fields you write in, talk to the assistant, turn a voice memo on a card into a note, and what a minute of cloud voice costs on each plan.
- [Links and previews](https://themarginapp.com/docs/links.md): Any web address you save opens with a tap, and a saved link shows a small card with the page's title and picture. What gets fetched, by whom, and how to turn it off.
- [Files and scans](https://themarginapp.com/docs/files-and-scans.md): Attach files to cards and notes, scan paper into a searchable PDF, find a picture or a file by a word inside it, and how much storage each plan holds.

## The rest of life

- [Habits](https://themarginapp.com/docs/habits.md): Check-ins, streaks, six months of history at a glance, and a partner in the household who can see whether you actually did it.
- [Expenses and money](https://themarginapp.com/docs/expenses-and-money.md): What went out, what came in, what is owed either way, and budgets that mean something because they sit next to your income.
- [Recipes and the meal plan](https://themarginapp.com/docs/recipes-and-meals.md): A recipe register on every plan, import from a link or a paste, cook one step at a time, and a weekly grid that knows who is cooking and what needs buying.
- [Focus and Journal](https://themarginapp.com/docs/focus-and-journal.md): A focus timer that keeps running when you leave the page, and a journal that gathers each day for you and leaves room to write.
- [Take a break](https://themarginapp.com/docs/take-a-break.md): A shelf of small games for a five-minute break: a week to fill, a table to seat, a paper plane, a board of tangled threads, and the classics, volleyball included. Play calm or competitive, and each keeps your best score.

## The Mind

- [The Mind](https://themarginapp.com/docs/the-mind.md): What your workspace remembers about your work and the people in it, where that memory comes from, and how to correct or delete any of it.
- [Margin Intelligence](https://themarginapp.com/docs/margin-ai.md): An assistant that operates the product through the same tools you do, what one action costs against your allowance, and where it is not allowed to look.
- [Curating the Mind](https://themarginapp.com/docs/curating-the-mind.md): The review queue at Organize, the Names directory, Put away, and why the workspace asks before it believes anything.

## Together

- [Family workspaces](https://themarginapp.com/docs/family.md): Roles that actually restrict, chores that can be checked and approved, and the household pages a family workspace turns on.
- [Pocket money and points](https://themarginapp.com/docs/pocket-money-and-points.md): A running balance per person that nobody can quietly edit, allowances that credit themselves on payday, one pot shared between children, savings goals that hold real money back, a points game that is never money, and a rewards shelf to spend points on.
- [The shopping list](https://themarginapp.com/docs/the-shopping-list.md): One list the household shares, sorted by aisle, that works in a supermarket basement with no signal and tells everyone when somebody is already at the store.
- [The wall display](https://themarginapp.com/docs/the-wall-display.md): Turn a spare tablet into the household's shared screen: today's meals, chores, the shopping list and the standings across the room, and a name to tap when you want to check something off.
- [Sharing and permissions](https://themarginapp.com/docs/sharing-and-permissions.md): Boards are shared by membership, single items can go to a single person, and connections let you find and talk to people outside your workspaces.
- [Team hub](https://themarginapp.com/docs/team-hub.md): The home page of a team workspace: what needs you, who is around, who is carrying what, who can open which board, and what changed while you were away.
- [People and roles](https://themarginapp.com/docs/people-and-roles.md): Where the people in a family or team live, how to add someone, what each role can do, PINs for the wall display, and the history of who changed what.
- [Team agents](https://themarginapp.com/docs/team-agents.md): Agents your team makes for itself: a name, instructions and a set of tools, working on the team's boards when someone asks or on a schedule, with every run and its result kept where the whole team can read it.
- [Chat](https://themarginapp.com/docs/chat.md): Threads with the people you share a workspace with or are connected to, including the household. Works offline like the rest of the app.

## Control and connections

- [Plans and limits](https://themarginapp.com/docs/plans-and-limits.md): What Free actually includes, what it does not, what the trial grants, and what happens the moment you reach a ceiling.
- [Your data](https://themarginapp.com/docs/your-data.md): Where it lives, every way to get it out, what the Vault hides and what it does not, and what deleting something deletes.
- [Integrations](https://themarginapp.com/docs/integrations.md): Sync card due dates with Google Calendar, show the family calendar in Apple Calendar or Outlook, forward school letters by email, sync a board with Google Sheets, send signed webhooks, link GitHub pull requests to cards, reach Zapier, Make and n8n, post to Slack, and bring in Canva designs.
- [Agents and MCP](https://themarginapp.com/docs/agents-and-mcp.md): Point any MCP client at your workspace and give it the same tools the built-in assistant uses, let an agent try it on a demo household with no account, or hand a whole task to a specialist agent over A2A.
- [Agent Pacts](https://themarginapp.com/docs/agent-pacts.md): One shared page where several agents work on the same job, with zones the server enforces, a thread nobody can rewrite, and every question they cannot settle routed to you.
- [Keyboard shortcuts](https://themarginapp.com/docs/keyboard-shortcuts.md): Every shortcut the app actually listens for: the palette, the go-to chords, board selection, the one-key Inbox queue and the note editor.
- [Importing from other tools](https://themarginapp.com/docs/importing-your-life.md): Obsidian vaults, Notion exports, Todoist, Trello, Google Keep, Markdown, CSV, Excalidraw scenes, a Margin export, and recipes from a link, with the folder tree intact.
- [Themes and appearance](https://themarginapp.com/docs/themes-and-appearance.md): Eight hand-built themes, six characters to stand in for Margin, and one dial for the size of every word.
- [Notifications and sounds](https://themarginapp.com/docs/notifications.md): The bell holds one inbox for every workspace you belong to. Push brings it to a phone or laptop with The Margin closed, and six short sounds tell you when something arrives while it is open.
- [Getting help](https://themarginapp.com/docs/getting-help.md): Ask Margin Intelligence how something works, report a problem from inside the app and follow what happens to it, and check the status page when you can't tell whose fault it is.
- [Two-factor sign-in](https://themarginapp.com/docs/two-factor-sign-in.md): Turn on a second step at sign-in with an authenticator app, keep recovery codes for a lost phone, and what happens when a Team requires it.

## Optional

- [Every docs page in one file](https://themarginapp.com/docs/llms-full.txt): the same pages concatenated, for a single fetch
- [The Margin, in one page](https://themarginapp.com/llms.txt): the product overview and the MCP entry points
- [Field notes](https://themarginapp.com/stories): real jobs done in the app as it is today, and why things work the way they do, written as they were built