What The Margin is
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.
Checked against the running product on 4 min readMarkdown
On this page
Most productivity setups are five apps in a trench coat. Tasks in one, notes in another, money in a spreadsheet, habits in a phone app, dinner decided at 6pm, and the household coordinated over text messages. Each one is good at its job and completely incurious about the other four.
The Margin keeps all of it in one place, and the pieces can see each other.
How it is organized#
A workspace is the outermost container, and everything you make belongs to one. Most people have a personal workspace and, if they share a home, a family one. You can belong to several and switch between them from the top of the sidebar. You can also stay signed in to more than one account at once and swap between them from the header.
A notification says which workspace it is about, and opening it takes you there.
The words the rest of these docs use
- Workspace
- personal, family or team. It decides who else can see what is inside it.
- Module
- one surface inside a workspace, such as Notes, Boards or Expenses. Each has its own color in the sidebar, so you can tell where you are without reading.
- Hub
- the extra surface a family or team workspace gets, pinned under Dashboard.
- The Mind
- the memory that reads across every module.
What is in the sidebar#
The sidebar groups modules by what you came to do.
| Group | Modules |
|---|---|
| At the top | Mind, Names and Organize, three views of the same memory |
| First | Dashboard, the workspace's hub if it has one, People, and Today |
| Create | Notes, Boards, Whiteboards, Checklists, Journal |
| Plan | Planner, Calendar, Inbox, Habits, Focus, Recipes, and Meals and Shopping in a family workspace |
| Track | Expenses, Chat, Pacts (on plans that include them), Templates |
| Below them | Your boards, then Views, the saved filters that gather cards across boards |
Search lives in the header on every page, and so does one command panel on ⌘K. The break room is in the header too.
A family workspace adds its hub: chores, pocket money, the shopping list, points and a wall display for the kitchen. A team workspace adds a roster, the boards the team shares and, on the Team plan, the team's own Agents. See Family workspaces and Team hub.
The Mind, the assistant, and your own agents#
The Mind reads across everything you have written and keeps a memory of the people, projects and commitments that keep coming up. See The Mind.
Margin Intelligence is the assistant. It works through the same tools an outside agent gets, so what it can reach is written down in one list rather than improvised. See Margin Intelligence.
You can talk instead of type, to quick capture and to the assistant, with a monthly allowance of cloud voice on every plan. See Talking instead of typing.
Agents you bring yourself connect over MCP and get that same tool list. When more than one agent is working here, an Agent Pact sets the terms they work under. See Agents and MCP.
Team agents are ones a team makes inside Margin, on the Team plan: a name, instructions and tools, run by hand or on a schedule against the team's boards. See Team agents.
Two kinds of data#
Your own material lives in a real database on your device: boards and cards, notes, habits, expenses, income and debts, whiteboards, recipes, the week's meals, the shopping list, chores and chat. You can edit it on a plane, and it syncs when you reconnect.
Account material lives on the server and only there: which plan you are on, who belongs to a workspace, what role each person has. A device that could edit its own plan would not be a business, and a device that could promote itself to owner would make permissions decorative.
Who it is for#
The household is the first case the product was built around. The team workspace sits on the same sharing model, so a team gets the same boards and notes with a roster on top.
Some of it is unfinished. Where a page describes a limit, it says so in a box like the one above.