Getting your bearings

What the words mean

Self-Control uses a small set of domain terms. None of them are tricky on their own; the combination is what makes the product work.

Task

A named group of related chores, appointments, and checklist items. A task either recurs on a schedule — "sprinkler spring activation," "weekly pantry restock," "monthly tax envelope" — or is on-demand, with no schedule, that you start yourself whenever you need it ("deep clean the kitchen," "guest-room turnover").

Item

A single line inside a task — just a title, and nothing else to fill in (no sub-tasks or nested detail). On a shared task you can assign an item to a specific teammate, and related items can be gathered into named groups. Everything else about a given day — a description, an event time, a discussion — lives on the occurrence rather than the item, so the list itself stays a clean, scannable checklist.

Group

An optional named section for a task's items — "Kitchen," "Bathroom," "Outdoors" — so a long checklist reads as a few tidy blocks instead of one flat list. Put items into a group, reorder the groups, and rename or remove one whenever you like; removing a group keeps its items and simply ungroups them. A rename or reorder flows through to every upcoming occurrence, and on a shared task you can hand a whole group to one teammate in a single step.

Schedule

The recurrence rule attached to a task. Six rule types cover the common patterns — weekly ("every Tuesday", or every 2nd week on chosen days), day of month (pick 31 for "last day of the month" — shorter months clamp to their last day), nth weekday ("2nd Tuesday", "last Friday"), week of month ("Tuesday of the 2nd week" — counts the calendar's Mon–Sun rows rather than weekday occurrences), a yearly date, and a fixed every-N-days interval. You can stack rules — e.g. "first Monday of every month" plus "the 15th" — and the dates are merged.

Occurrence

One dated instance of a task, with its own completion tracking, description, event time, and discussion thread. Those details are set once on the task and inherited by every occurrence — or overridden on a single day when it needs to differ. For a recurring task the dates are created for you automatically — when you create it, when you edit its schedule, and topped up daily — so Today and the Calendar always show what's next. An on-demand task has none until you start one yourself ("Start now" / "Do it again"). While an occurrence is open, the task's items keep flowing into it — a renamed or added item updates every line you haven't ticked yet, and a removed one drops out — while each line you have ticked stays exactly as you ticked it. Once the occurrence is completed or dismissed, it becomes history and never rewrites.

One-off

A single dated task that isn't a routine — an appointment, a meeting, a follow-up. Add one from Quick add — reachable from anywhere, and already set to whatever day you're looking at: give it a title, an optional time, and an optional reminder, and it lands on Today and the Calendar for that date. For something with more to it, New task offers a One-off kind too, so a single task can still carry a checklist, tags and a priority. A one-off is deliberately not a reusable task — it doesn't appear in your Tasks list, and once it's done it quietly files itself away, so single tasks never pile up among your recurring routines.

Calendar

Three ways to look at your occurrences, all color-coded by person. Month is the overview — each day lists its tasks by name as small colored chips (with a "+N more" when the day is full), so you can read what a day holds at a glance; select a day to open it. Week and Day each switch between a List of day blocks — rows led by a start time and how long the task takes — and a Grid, an hour-by-hour schedule where two people booked at the same time sit side by side. Anything with no time set sits at the top of the day, since it can happen anytime. Upcoming dates show up faded and open like any other occurrence, so a month far ahead is never blank.

Priorities

An optional way to look at Today. Switch the view from List to Priorities and your occurrences sort into four corners. Priorities has two lenses you flip between: Eisenhower Matrix (how urgent and important each routine is — Focus now / Plan ahead / If there's time / Someday) and Priority Board (how much effort it takes versus the impact it has — Quick wins / Big projects / Fill-ins / Maybe later). Each task sets its starting corner; drag a card (web) or tap Move (mobile) to nudge a single occurrence without changing the whole routine. A third Load view groups today's occurrences by effort (High / Medium / Low) against a gentle 1-3-5 budget — a glanceable "how busy is today" read.

Team

A small collaboration group (owner + up to 6 members on Pro). Owners can share any number of their tasks with a team at read or read-write access. Sharing a task shares its occurrences; checking off an item on a shared occurrence is a single shared action, not one state per member. You can belong to as many teams as you like (owned plus joined).

Template

A reusable blueprint saved from one of your own tasks — its items, schedule, and priority defaults. "Save as template" sits on a task's menu; your saved templates then appear in a Saved group when you create a new task, next to the built-in starter templates. A template is inert — it has no occurrences and isn't shared; picking one just pre-fills the create form so you don't rebuild a similar task from scratch.

Common questions

Still stuck

Email support@self-control.app and we'll get back to you. Include your account email if you can — it helps us look up your situation without a back-and-forth.

We're a small team, so replies come during European working hours. Urgent billing issues get triaged first.