LifeHQ user manual

Go to mylifehq.app and choose Create an account. You need an email address you can read — it is how you sign in, how a password reset reaches you, and how somebody adds you to a household plan.

Set your time zone on the way in. Everything is stored in UTC and shown in your zone, so a wrong setting here is what makes an event appear an hour out. You can change it later under Settings.

Today is the landing screen and the only one that reads across modules. It answers one question — what is on, what is due, what you said you would do — and then gets out of the way.

What appears there depends on which modules you have installed. Each one can contribute a card, and you can reorder them in Settings.

Press Ctrl+K anywhere (Cmd+K on a Mac) to open the command palette. From there you can jump to any module, search across your data, or capture something without leaving the page you are on.

If you learn one shortcut, learn this one. It is usually quicker than the sidebar.

A new account starts with Calendar, Todos and Memos. Everything else comes from the Store.

Every module is a plugin, including the ones we wrote, so they all install and remove the same way. Removing one hides it and keeps its data — put it back and everything is where you left it. The two exceptions are described under Your data, and both warn you first.

In any browser, as a Windows application, and as an Android app. They share one account and one set of data.

• Browser — nothing to install. On a phone, use Add to Home Screen for an icon and a full-screen window.
• Windows — download the installer from the website. It is a window onto the hosted app, so new features arrive without reinstalling.
• Android — the app covers the main modules with native screens and opens the newer ones in your browser, so nothing you installed is ever simply missing.

A free account covers exactly one device. See Plans and devices — this is the single thing people trip over.

LifeHQ opens light. Themes in the sidebar on the web and the Windows app puts the list on one side and a sample of the app on the other: rest the pointer on a theme and the sample repaints in it, click and it is yours. On the phone it is More → Theme, a list that repaints the app as you tap. There are eighteen everyday themes to choose from in nine light-and-dark pairs, and they differ in shape as well as colour: Lagoon (teal, soft corners), Harbor (blue, square corners and striped bars), Blossom (rose, extra-round and flat), Meadow (green, a dotted field behind the page), Sunrise (amber, glassy buttons with real shadows), Plum (purple, pill-shaped controls on a faint weave), Overcast (grey-blue, flat and plain), Mono (high contrast with heavy borders), and Classic, the original forest-and-parchment look with its serif headings.

Below those sit twenty-four holiday and seasonal themes, a light and a dark for each: New Year's, Valentine's, St Patrick's, Spring, Maytime, Strawberry, the Fourth of July, Summer, Schoolhouse, Halloween, Thanksgiving and Christmas — one for every month, each with its own motif behind the page. Picked individually, one stays until you change it.

Seasonal hands the choice to the calendar: pick it and the month's theme is applied, changing over on the first of each month. The ☾ button swaps between the month's day and night themes, and the choice follows your account like any other.

The theme you pick is saved to your account, so a new browser, the Windows app and the phone all open in it. The ☾ button in the header swaps a theme for its dark partner and back. Match my system follows the device instead — it is a choice, not the default, so the app never goes dark just because the phone did.

Month, week and day views. Create an event by clicking a slot or pressing Ctrl+K and typing. Events can repeat on real rules — every second Tuesday, the last Friday of the month — and you can change or delete a single occurrence without touching the rest of the series.

You can keep several calendars (work, family, birthdays) and colour them separately. Sharing one is covered under Sharing with family.

Public links. A calendar can be published as a read-only link that anybody can subscribe to from their own calendar app. That is free and does not require the other person to have an account.

A week at a glance with breakfast, lunch, dinner and snack slots. Drop in a recipe, or just type what you are having — “leftovers” and “out for Ella's birthday” are real answers, and a planner that only accepts recipes gets abandoned in a week.

Send the week to a shopping list and every ingredient from the recipes you planned goes onto it in one press. Anything already on the list is left alone, so pressing it twice does not double the onions. Quantities are not added together, because they are free text — “2”, “250g”, “a good pinch” — and adding those produces confident nonsense.

Set up the jobs your household actually has, how often each comes round, and who takes turns. Everybody gets their own turn in order and a nudge on the morning it falls to them.

Anyone in the rota can tick off anyone's chore. Covering for somebody is the ordinary case in a household, and what gets recorded is who actually did it rather than who it was assigned to.

Adding somebody to a rota re-deals future turns and leaves the past alone, so a chore never reassigns its own history. Points are optional and exist mainly for households where they settle arguments.

Todos live in categories — Home, Work, Errands, whatever you make — and a todo can carry notes and a checklist of tasks under it. Tick the tasks off and the todo shows how far along it is as a percentage, on the list and on the phone. Categories, nested tasks, due dates, priorities and repeat rules. A task with a due date today shows a count on the sidebar, which is the only badge that means “needs attention” rather than “exists”.

Lists can be shared, so a shared list is a genuinely joint one — both people add and tick off, and each addition shows who made it.

One thing to remember, with as many alerts as it takes. A reminder is a single item with several times attached, rather than five separate notes saying the same sentence.

Each alert can reach you in the app, as a push notification, as an alarm, by email, or by text. On Android the alarm is the phone's own: it rings at alarm volume — through silent — with vibration, Snooze and Dismiss, with the app closed and after a reboot. Alerts that have already fired are kept as a record, and one that failed says why.

Classes, then assignments filed under them with instructions, a due date, how long you think it will take and where to hand it in. The list is grouped by how soon things are due rather than by subject, because that is the question you are actually asking.

Reminders are set as “a day before” rather than a clock time, so moving a deadline moves them with it. Handing something in clears its reminders.

A Pomodoro timer that can be attached to a specific task, so the time is logged against something rather than into the air. The history shows where your hours actually went over the last fortnight.

Build a deck with words or pictures on either side, take a ready-made one from the Store, or load a file somebody sent you. Tap a card to turn it over and say whether you got it right.

Stop showing after N right retires a card once you have got it right that many times in a row. A card you got right three times and wrong nine is not learned, and counting the total rather than the streak is how a drill quietly stops covering the thing you keep failing. Set it to 0 and every card shows every time.

Share a set with family and everybody keeps their own progress — one person finishing a deck does not hide those cards from anyone else. Only the owner can edit the cards; anybody can save a copy to a file.

An address book with birthdays, tags and favourites. Birthdays feed the Gifts module and can appear on your calendar.

Talk to the people you are connected to. You can send pictures and files, take a photo straight from the camera on a phone, and create a group for the whole family or just the kids.

Messages arrive instantly while the app is open, and as a notification when it is not — including on a phone with the app closed, the way a text does.

Messages are not end-to-end encrypted. They are encrypted in transit and stored on the server, which means they can be recovered if you lose a device — and it also means they are not private from the server. Do not use them for anything you would not put in an email.

Ideas kept against the people you buy for, with a link, a rough price and why you thought of it — the part you will have forgotten by November.

Birthdays come from Contacts, so the list arrives already knowing who is next. Mark something bought, wrapped and given, and it stays on the record, which is how you avoid giving the same person the same thing two years running.

Daily or weekly targets with a streak and a contribution heatmap going back six months. Tick today off from the Today view without opening anything.

A streak is not broken by today being unfinished — only by a whole day being missed.

Log a run, ride, swim, walk, hike, row, climb, yoga session or a full lifting workout with every set. Every measure is optional and only the ones that make sense for the sport are asked for — a run has a distance and a pace, a lifting session has reps and a tonnage, yoga has neither.

Runners get minutes per mile, cyclists get miles per hour and swimmers get a time per 100 metres, because that is how each is actually talked about.

Share your log with family and their sessions appear beside yours. When somebody posts one, everybody they share with is told. A nod is the only reaction, on purpose.

A schedule for anything taken regularly, for you or for somebody you look after. Each dose is ticked off, so “have I already taken it?” has an answer.

Count what is left in the pack and it will tell you when to reorder, before the last one rather than after.

This is a schedule and a record, not medical advice. Nothing is checked against anything — doses, interactions and timings are between you and whoever prescribed them.

Balances, interest rates and minimum payments, with a payoff projection and a side-by-side comparison of the avalanche and snowball strategies — highest interest first, or smallest balance first.

Put an extra amount per month in and it shows you what that actually buys in months saved and interest avoided.

Every recurring charge, what it renews at and when. The monthly and yearly totals sit at the top, and the yearly one is usually a bigger number than people expect.

Free trials get a warning before they turn into a charge, which is the one case where doing nothing costs money nobody agreed to. Cancelled entries are kept rather than deleted, so the total can show what you have already saved.

A list per shop, with quantities and a note where one helps. Tick things off as they go in the trolley; swipe an item left to remove it.

Share a list and other people's additions show up with their name against them, so you know who wanted the thing you do not recognise.

Ingredients, method, times, servings and where it came from. Group ingredients under headings for a sauce or a topping, tag a recipe so you can find it again, and mark the ones worth repeating.

Search looks inside the ingredients as well as the titles, which is how you answer “what can I do with fennel”. An Add button beside each ingredient puts it straight on a shopping list, or send the whole recipe at once.

Model numbers, serial numbers, what was paid and when, with photographs of the item, its serial plate and the receipt.

Warranties warn you before they lapse, which is the whole point of writing any of it down. Dull until the washing machine dies or an insurer asks for a list.

Every vehicle with its plate, mileage and history of work done. Say when the next service is due by date or by mileage and it warns on whichever comes first.

Insurance, registration and inspection dates get their own countdown, because those are the ones that turn into a fine rather than a repair.

A live clock, other time zones, a countdown timer, a stopwatch with laps, and alarms that repeat on the days you choose.

On Android the timer goes off even when the app is closed, with sound and vibration, and shows a live countdown in the notification shade.

• Weather — current conditions, hourly and a seven-day forecast for the places you save.
• Calculator — simple by default, scientific behind one switch. Works from the keyboard. Nothing is sent anywhere.
• Memos — notes filed into categories, with tags and pinning. A memo can be shared with one person at a time.
• Memory — learn a passage by filling in the words that are missing, with the gaps widening as you get it right.

Subscribe to any site that publishes a feed by pasting its address, or pick from a browsable list of free sources grouped by subject. Everything arrives in one river, newest first, with the unread count in the sidebar.

There is no algorithm and no recommendations: you see what you subscribed to, in the order it was published. Save an article to come back to it.

Save YouTube videos into playlists and watch them without leaving LifeHQ. Set a playlist to loop, to shuffle, or both.

Lock a playlist and the player will play nothing that is not on the list — no suggestions, no next video, no way to wander off. That is what makes it safe to hand a child a tablet. Put a PIN on it and unlocking needs the PIN; so does deleting the playlist or editing what is on it.

Paste an address and LifeHQ goes and reads the page: the title, what it is about, the site it came from and its icon all arrive on their own a moment later. You can paste several at once, one per line. Nothing waits on the other site — if a page never answers, the bookmark is still saved and you can open it, edit the title yourself, or ask it to try reading again.

Collections are folders, two levels deep — a collection and the collections inside it. Tags are free-form and a bookmark can have as many as you like. Search covers titles, your own notes, tags and addresses at once, so half-remembering any part of it is enough.

The reading list looks after itself. Everything you save starts unread, and opening a link marks it read — there is nothing to tick off. Filter to Unread when you want something to read.

Saving the same page twice is noticed even when the two addresses differ, because the tracking parameters an email or a share button adds are ignored when comparing. You are told it is already saved rather than stopped, since filing one page in two collections is sometimes the point.

Saving from elsewhere. On a phone, share any page to LifeHQ from the share sheet. On a desktop, Import & export offers a button for your bookmarks bar that saves whatever you are looking at.

Bringing bookmarks with you. Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Edge, Raindrop and Pocket all export the same HTML file, and any of them imports here with its folders intact. Folders deeper than two levels become tags rather than being lost. Pages are not read during an import — several thousand at once would take hours — so imported bookmarks keep the titles the file already had. You can export the same file back out at any time.

Links that stop answering are flagged, never deleted, and appear under a Broken filter. Sites come back.

One entry a day, as long or short as you like, with a mood and any pictures worth keeping. The year is drawn as a heatmap, so the shape of a good month is visible without reading a word of it.

Entries are private to your account and are never shared with anyone you are connected to.

Go to Family and invite them by email. They accept, and you are linked.

Being connected grants nothing by itself. It only makes sharing possible. Until you share something specific, they can see nothing of yours and you can see nothing of theirs.

Sharing has two steps, on purpose. First you turn on a category for that person in Family — calendars, contacts, memos, shopping, workouts or flash cards. That grants the ability to share, not access to anything.

Then you share the individual thing: this calendar, that shopping list, this flash card set. Each is one item, with one person, chosen by you, and withdrawable at any time.

Everything else stays yours. A household plan shares the subscription and nothing else.

A free account covers exactly one device. Not one at a time — one. Sign in on your laptop and your phone will be refused. This is the thing that confuses almost everybody, and it is deliberate: what is being paid for is using LifeHQ in more than one place.

To move to a different machine, release the first one: Settings → Devices → Sign out on the device you are leaving. Signing out and back in on the same machine costs nothing.

If the device is gone — a phone you replaced, a laptop that died — ask support to release it. That path exists so a broken machine is not a lost account.

• Free — every feature, one device, no trial clock.
• Plus — $3 a month. Unlimited devices and sharing.
• Household — $12 a month for up to six people. Six individual subscriptions would be $18, so it pays for itself from the fourth person.
• Family+ — the same $12 for the same six, and $3 a month for each person beyond them.

Everyone on a household plan keeps their own account and their own private data. Only the subscription is shared.

The person paying manages the household from the plan page. Add somebody by the email they signed up with — they need an account already, because there is no invite-by-email flow.

On Family+, seats are added and removed from the same page. You are charged for the part of the month you actually use a seat, and credited the same way when you remove one. A seat somebody is sitting in cannot be removed — take the person off the plan first.

Cancel from your own billing page at any time. It takes effect at the end of the period you have already paid for, and your data is untouched either way — you simply return to one device.

Every LifeHQ app has an Updates page — in the sidebar on the web and on Windows, under More on the phone. It shows the version you are on, checks for a newer one when you ask, lists what changed, and has the button that installs it. A bar across the top of the app, or a notice on Today on the phone, says when there is something to install. Nothing updates without you pressing that button.

Send feedback sits in the header of every page on the web and under More on the phone. Type what happened or what you wish it did; the version, the page and the platform go with it on their own. If a page ever breaks outright, the app reports that itself, with the page and the version, and shows you a way back — nothing needs to be told twice.

What the button does depends on where you are. In a browser the app is the newest version as soon as it reloads, so the button reloads — it waits for you because anything typed and not saved would go with it. On Windows it downloads the new installer in the background and restarts into it. On Android it opens the new build, from Google Play if that is where you installed from and otherwise as a download; the phone asks before installing over the old one, and you stay signed in either way.

Settings has a single button that asks your browser or phone for permission and registers the device. There is a test button beside it, so you can confirm it works rather than waiting for a real reminder to find out.

If you previously refused the browser prompt, the button cannot ask again — browsers only allow one prompt. Clear the site's notification permission in your browser settings and try again.

• In the app — a toast while LifeHQ is open.
• Push — reaches a browser, an installed web app, or the Android app, whether or not it is open.
• Alarm — push, but asking the phone to make noise even on silent. For the things you cannot miss.
• Email — plain and readable, no marketing chrome.
• Text message — costs real money per send and needs a phone number on your profile, so it is never a default.

Settings gives you a complete copy of everything you have put in, as a file, at any time. No waiting and no request to approve.

These are two different things and each says plainly what survives.

• Delete all data empties your account and keeps it. You keep your email, password, authenticator, devices and subscription, and lose everything you put in. Useful for starting a year again without cancelling and re-subscribing.
• Close your account removes the account itself.

Both delete rather than hide, and neither has an undo or a grace period. Both ask for your password, and both offer you an export first. Copies already written to nightly backups age out with those backups.

Your links to other people survive “delete all data” — a connection is a relationship rather than a possession. The things you had shared go, because they no longer exist.

There is no advertising, because advertising would require tracking you, and nothing is sold, because your calendar is not ours to sell. If that ever has to change you will be told before it does, not after.

You are on the free plan and already signed in somewhere else. Release the other device from Settings → Devices on that machine, or subscribe. See The one-device rule.

It was removed from your dashboard rather than deleted. Open the Store and add it back — your data is exactly where you left it.

Check Settings first: the button there says whether this device is registered, and the test button proves it either way. On a phone, also check that LifeHQ is allowed to send notifications in the system settings, and that battery optimisation is not stopping it.

Almost always a time zone. Check the one on your profile under Settings — everything is stored in UTC and shown in your zone, so a wrong setting shifts everything consistently.

Entitlement is checked against the billing service and cached. Open the plan page, which forces a fresh check. If it still says Free after a few minutes, contact support with the email you paid with — do not buy it again.

Use the contact form on the website. Say what you expected to happen as well as what did — a screenshot shows us the second, but only you know the first.