← All guides
Getting started

Your first week in Clarity OS

What to set up on day one, what to do each morning, and what to turn on once the daily rhythm feels easy. Twenty minutes of setup, spread across a week.

The whole thing in six lines
  • 1Day one: finish Your Clarity Setup, do the Clarity Check-In, then empty your head into the chat.
  • 2Every morning after that: open the app, confirm the plan it hands you, lock in the day.
  • 3During the day: anything new goes into the chat rather than into your head.
  • 4Before bed: the evening check-in, then one last dump of whatever is still circling. Anything written down here is something you no longer have to stay awake holding.
  • 5Once that's a habit: add a goal, paste in your calendar, and connect Gmail or your partner.
  • 6Sunday: the Weekly Clarity Review — look back, then set up the week.
First, getting in

Signing in and your beta access

The app lives at app.clarityos.info. Create your account with your email and a password, and use the same sign-in on every device — phone, laptop, desktop app. Everything syncs to your account, so there is no "which one has my list" question.

If you were accepted into the Founding Beta, you'll be asked to choose a plan on the way in. Underneath that, find Have a beta code?, type your code, and submit. That opens 60 days of full access with no card. When the 60 days end you can continue at $15/month or $129/year, or stop.

Joining a partner's household instead? You don't need a code of your own — see the partner guide.

Day one

The two things that set up everything else

Both run themselves the first time you sign in. Together they take about ten minutes, and everything the app says to you afterwards is shaped by them.

1 · Your Clarity Setup — about 7 minutes

Seven short screens. Nothing here is scored, and every answer is editable later.

  • What to call you, and what you do — so nothing that comes back reads generic.
  • Who's at home, and who shares this load — a partner, family, coworkers, or mostly you. This is what makes the Check-In skip the questions that don't apply to you.
  • Your life areas — pick from the list or type your own. These become your categories, and everything you capture gets filed into them.
  • Bigger things in motion — these become your projects.
  • How you keep track today — paper, an app, your head, all three. Context only.
  • One or two things you want to move forward — these become your goals, and goals are how the app knows what matters.
  • What a lighter week would feel like, and whether you want the coach gentle or pushing a little.

Redo it any time from SettingsCoachingRedo my profile setup. Clicking straight through changes nothing.

2 · The Clarity Check-In — 2 to 3 minutes

A warm read on what you're actually carrying right now: the areas that sit heaviest, the load nobody else can see, and whether anything in your week gives something back to you.

It isn't a test and there's no passing score. Every number it shows comes with plain words for what that number means. Take it once on day one and it becomes your baseline; retake it in a few weeks from SettingsCoaching and you'll see what actually shifted.

3 · Then empty your head

Open the chat and dump everything you're holding — unsorted, out of order, half-sentences are fine. Tap the mic if talking is faster than typing.

The coach sorts what you said into your board, files each thing into a life area, and tells you what it did. This is the one habit the whole app is built around: the more consistently you put things here instead of holding them, the more useful every other part becomes.

Where things go

Your board, in four places

Today's Requirements

What today genuinely needs. Kept short on purpose — a list of twenty isn't a plan.

Quick Wins

Small things you can finish in a few minutes. Kept separate so they stop competing with real work for space in your head.

Week Ahead

Dated, or landing later this week. Open the Week tab to see it laid out alongside your calendar.

Later & handed off

Parked, and not lost. Things you've set down for now, plus anything you've handed to someone else, so you can see it without carrying it.

Moving things around

Every task has an arrow menu. That's where you move it between the four places, link it to a goal or a project, hand it to your partner, or send it to someone by text or email. Click the circle to mark it done — it goes to your archive, where you can search it later.

Day two onward

The daily loop

Morning

From your second day, the Morning Flow opens once a day when you first arrive. It shows you what carried over from yesterday, what today asks of you, and why each thing is on the list — timely, stuck, or moving a goal. Anything you leave behind is kept, not lost. End it with Lock in my day.

Day one skips it on purpose: there's no day in the app yet to read.

Through the day

The chat is where everything goes. Ask it to plan your afternoon, think a decision through with you, or just take something off your hands. Alongside it there's a row of tools for when you're stuck:

Coach meFeeling overwhelmedUnstick meEnergy BoostBody doubleTransition resetTime-map itBrain dump

Feeling overwhelmed is the one people miss. It doesn't sort anything — it gives you room to say what's heavy and find your own next step.

When you need to actually work

Start a focus sprint, pick the task you're working on, and go. 25 minutes by default. Body double takes it further and checks in on you every ten minutes while you work.

Evening

The evening check-in asks one question worth answering honestly: is there anything you did today that was never on your list? That's usually the invisible work, and naming it is how it stops being invisible.

Then, before you shut the laptop, put whatever is still circling into the chat — tomorrow's worries, the thing you almost forgot, the half-decision. It is held somewhere other than your head overnight, which is the difference between going to bed and lying there at 2am running the list.

Once the daily rhythm is easy

What to turn on next

In order of how much they give back. Do one a day rather than all in one sitting.

Goals

Settings → Goals. This is the only thing the app treats as importance. Name what you're working toward — "finish the book proposal", "get the beta out" — and any task linked to it rises to the top of your morning with the goal named. Without a goal, everything is equally urgent, which is another way of saying nothing is.

Your calendar

Settings → Calendar, then pick your calendar in the app and follow the four steps it shows you. The short version:

Google. Settings → click your calendar in the left column → Integrate calendar → copy Secret address in iCal format. Two addresses sit next to each other there and both end in basic.ics, so that is not the tell — the one you want has /private- in the middle. The other has /public/ and returns "not found" unless the calendar is public. If there is no Secret address at all, it is a work or school calendar whose admin has turned off external sharing; make that calendar public and use the Public address, or ask your admin.

Outlook. Settings → Calendar → Shared calendars → Publish a calendar, permission Can view all details. It gives you two links; copy the one ending in .ics, not the .html one.

iCloud. Click the share icon next to the calendar's name, turn on Public Calendar, and copy the link. It starts with webcal://.

Your events then show up in your week, and the morning reads the shape of your day before it suggests anything. It's visibility only: Clarity never writes to your calendar. If a calendar ever stops loading, its row in SettingsCalendar says so and why.

Projects

Settings → Projects, or just mention one in chat. Anything with more than a couple of steps belongs in a project so those steps stop cluttering your daily list. The coach will propose a project when it notices one; you decide whether it exists.

Categories

Settings → Categories. Your life areas, from setup. Rename them, add your own, or remove ones that aren't your life. Removing one never deletes tasks.

Gmail

Gmail tab → Connect Gmail account, then Scan. It reads for genuine action items, deadlines, and things waiting on a reply, and shows them to you one by one to add or dismiss. Entirely optional — everything else works without it. Add the people you can't afford to miss under Contacts & VIPs and their mail always surfaces.

Your partner

Family tab. Connect two accounts into one household, share what's genuinely joint, and see who is really carrying what. It has its own walkthrough: Sharing the load with your partner.

Voice

Settings → Voice. The mic in the chat already lets you speak instead of type. This adds the other direction — the coach reads its replies aloud. Off by default.

People you hand things to

Settings → Contacts & VIPs. Save the people you delegate to and you can send a task straight to them by text or email, whether or not they use the app.

Weekly

The Sunday half hour

Weekly Clarity Review — Settings → Reports

Two halves. The look back shows where your week actually went, what you cleared, what you handed off, and asks how it felt. Then the week ahead: what's still lingering and what to do about each one, your three real priorities with a first step, where the joy is, and the single thing that would make next week feel like a win.

It is the one part of the app worth protecting time for. Thirty minutes on a Sunday changes what the following five mornings feel like.

Two places worth wandering into

Insights (Settings → Insights) reads your patterns back to you — what keeps slipping, when you actually get things done.

Archive holds everything you've cleared and every past conversation, searchable. On a week that felt like nothing got done, this is the honest correction.

If you like a checklist

Your first week

  • Day 1 — Your Clarity Setup, the Check-In, one full brain dump, one goal.
  • Day 2 — Morning Flow, lock in the day, one focus sprint.
  • Day 3 — paste in your calendar link.
  • Day 4 — tidy your categories, turn the two big things into projects.
  • Day 5 — connect Gmail, or invite your partner.
  • Sunday — the Weekly Clarity Review.
And if you do nothing else

Dump your head into the chat every morning. Keep one goal named. Do the weekly review. Those three carry most of the relief on their own — the rest is refinement.

Questions as they come up: the FAQ covers most of them, and support@clarityos.info covers the rest.