Routines and timetables

A routine is a short run of steps you do in order: a morning, a study hour, a child's bedtime. A timetable is the shape of your week: the classes, shifts and standing hours that repeat. Both live under Routines, in the sidebar beside the planner (on the phone, in the Plan list), and Today, the planner and the command palette open it too.

Make a routine#

Five starters sit above the tabs under Start from one of these: School morning, Bedtime, After school, Homework hour and Saturday reset, each with its own drawing. Pick one and the dialog opens already filled in, ready to change. In a household, a kids' starter is set for every child. Or press New routine and start from a shape (Morning, Evening wind-down, prayers) or a blank one. Then:

• Steps. Type a step and press Enter, or Link one you have to point a step at a habit, a chore or a checklist item that already exists in the workspace. A linked step is the real thing: ticking it logs the habit for the day, ticks the chore (with its approval and points, exactly as on the chore list) or ticks the checklist item. Nothing is copied, so a streak or a chore's points are counted once.
• Order. Drag a step by its handle on the web. On the phone, hold a step and drag it, or press it and choose Move up or Move down.
• Minutes. Give a step its minutes and the routine knows how long it takes. Once a step has minutes, Count down each step puts a timer on each one while it runs, which helps kids getting ready.
• Must do or nice to do. A step you add starts as Must do: the run is finished when all the must-do steps are ticked. A starter marks only the one or two that matter (at bedtime, brushing teeth and lights out) and leaves the rest Nice to do, which can be skipped on a busy day. Every card on the list shows which is which. Tap a step to switch it. When a routine's time has passed with must-do steps still open, Today names them, gently.
• When a step happens. A step follows the one before it, or sits at its own time ("School 6:40"), or, with prayer times on (see below), at the day's prayer time.
• When. Any day (you start it when you are ready), a part of the day (morning, after school, bedtime, as on the kids' wall), or at a time on the days you pick, with an optional last day such as the end of term.
• Who it's for. Your own routine is yours. A routine for someone else in the household, such as a child, comes with Family. Pick several people and they share one routine: two sisters with the same morning keep one list, and each ticks her own steps on her own run. The list shows it as one card that says One routine, ticked by each of them, with a row and a Start for each person. When one of them needs a different morning, Make a separate copy for her gives her her own routine, and today's ticks go with her.

Prayer times#

Prayer times need two switches. First your own Muslim features in Settings→Profile (see Muslim features); until it is on, nothing about prayer shows, including the switch below. Then the household's Prayer times at the bottom of Routines (on the phone, on the Routines screen). With both on, the day's five prayer times show on Today, worked out on the device from the household's town (the one set for the wall). A new Prayers routine is offered whose five steps sit at Fajr, Dhuhr, Asr, Maghrib and Isha each day, and any step of any routine can be set to a prayer's time. They are ticked like any other step. Both are off by default.

If a linked chore or habit is deleted later, the step stays with its own label and ticks as a plain step.

Delete a routine or a goal and it waits in Recently deleted (Settings, then Data) for 30 days, a routine with its steps and a goal with its links, so either comes back whole.

Run it#

Press Start. One step shows at a time, large enough to read across the room, with its timer when the routine counts down. Press Done and the next step comes up. When every must-do step is done the run is finished for the day. Steps tick the same way on Today, on the wall and on a child's own phone, each person on their own run. A household routine can carry a finishing bonus: points paid once a day, on top of each chore's own, and never twice however many times it is ticked.

On the family wall, a child taps their face and ticks the steps there. The routine on now and the next one show in full; the rest of the day's routines are one line each, so routines that repeat every day never crowd the page (the wall display).

A busy day needs no skipping: leave the nice-to-do steps and tick the must-do ones. To rest a routine for a while (the summer holidays), open it and press Archive under Options; Bring back returns it with its steps.

The timetable#

The Timetable tab is your week as a pattern. Add a block makes a timetable block: a calendar event of the kind Timetable, usually weekly on the days you pick and ending at the end of term. Blocks use the calendar's own repeats, so "this one or all" edits, reminders and A/B weeks (every other week) all work as they do for events. A routine with a time is its own timetable entry, drawn with every step at its time; it is never copied into blocks. Blocks are for time that is not a routine you run: school periods, shifts, classes.

On the calendar's week and month a daily routine is one slim line (its time and name). The day view and Today show it in full. In the calendar's list, what has already happened today folds to one line and what is ahead shows in full.

The planner's Hours view draws your blocks and timed routines beneath your cards, quietly, so you can plan around them. They do not count toward a day's planned minutes; card time blocks stay the card's own.

On Family, pick a person to see their timetable, or Everyone, side by side for one day across the household. Time someone has in another workspace shows only as Busy, with no title.

Start from a photo#

Press Start from a photo on Routines (on the phone it is at the bottom of the screen) and give Margin a class timetable, a sports schedule, a shift rota, an exam datesheet, a chore chart or a list of steps, as a photo, a PDF or pasted text. It reads the page once and shows every row before anything is saved:

• a weekly slot becomes a timetable block, repeating on its days until the end of term when the page says so;
• an exam becomes an exam on the calendar, with its paper and room;
• a list of steps becomes a routine, in order;
• a daily schedule (a column of times, even handwritten: "5:00 Fajr, 6:40 school, 2:30 lunch") becomes one routine whose steps keep their times. A line marked "negotiable" is a nice-to-do step and "non-negotiable" a must-do one, and a prayer line (Fajr, Dhuhr, Asr, Maghrib, Isha) follows the day's prayer time. Times are read forward through the day, so "2:30" after "6:40" is 2:30 PM. A free or off day on the page ("Saturday free day") sets the days it repeats instead of becoming a step, and anything else written on the page (a target, a note) is kept in its notes.

Edit any row, say who it is for, then add the rows you want. For a schedule you can change each step's time and wording, mark it must do or nice to do, and pick its days. It is saved as one routine that shows on the timetable, the calendar and My week with each step at its time. Choose several people and they share that one routine, each with their own ticks. Dates without a year are read as the coming term. This is on every plan and counts against the AI allowance; school letters by email stay a Family feature.

When a revised datesheet moves a paper, adding it again moves the exam that is already on the calendar instead of adding a second one.

Exams and revision#

My week lists your exams for the next four weeks. Plan revision places four sessions before each one in your free time across every workspace, closer together as the day nears, after school or work and before bedtime. You see each slot and why it fits, then Add them. They are one-off timetable blocks, so they never count toward a plan's repeating blocks. If the exam moves, on the calendar, from a revised datesheet or through Margin Intelligence, the sessions move with it and keep their spacing. A session you changed yourself stays where you put it, and so does one already past. Plan again replaces only the sessions you have not touched.

Homework and assignments are cards with a due date: put them on a board for the subject, in the student's workspace or the family's, and the people the board is shared with see how they are going.

Goals#

A goal is an outcome with a date: "Pass maths with an A", "Learn Arabic by June". Set one from Goals on the planner, or let Plan a goal build the board for it and keep the goal too. Then Link what gets you there: a board or a card, a habit, a routine, an exam, a savings goal. The bar fills from that work on its own: the board's cards done, the habit kept over four weeks, the routine finished, the exam sat, the money saved. There are no key results to keep; mark it done or let it go when you are finished with it.

Capture knows what you meant#

Type or say several things at once into capture ("ugh tired, gym tmrw? also mom's bday sat") and the Inbox sorts them: a routine with its steps, a household chore or a task of your own (it asks which when both fit), a habit, an event, a timetable block. Each comes as one chip; nothing is made until you press it. Your device sorts the capture straight away, offline too, and Margin's own reading refines it once the capture has synced. A line like "Morning: pray, exercise, shower" is one routine with three steps, so it is offered as a routine rather than as a shopping list.

My week#

My week brings together everything with a time from every workspace you belong to: blocks, events naming you, your timed routines and your card time blocks, each tagged with its workspace. Where two overlap, both are marked and Margin suggests a way out (move the later one, end the first one sooner, or ask someone else to take it). Nothing moves until you move it.

Margin Intelligence and other assistants#

Tell Margin Intelligence "my mornings: pray, exercise, shower, breakfast, out by 8" and it proposes the routine, linking the habits you already have, and writes it only after you say yes. It reads your week across workspaces before planning a day, and can find free time for something that has no time yet. Assistants connected through MCP have the same tools: list_routines, get_routine, create_routine, update_routine, delete_routine, tick_routine_step, split_routine, get_my_week and suggest_time. They take the people a routine is shared with, must do or nice to do steps, and a step's own time or prayer time, and tick_routine_step ticks one person's run.

Plans#

Timetable blocks stay on The Margin's calendar; they are not sent to Google Calendar.