Getting Started with Keel

Welcome to Keel! This guide will walk you through everything you need to know to start tracking habits and building resilience.

Setup takes about five minutes. The order matters more than the settings, so do it in this sequence: one habit, then a goal to hang it on, then the rest of your week.

Start with one habit, not fifteen

The most common way to fail in week one is to arrive with a list. Fifteen habits feels like progress and is the highest-risk possible start: every one is unformed, every one needs a cue you haven't built yet, and the first busy Tuesday takes out all fifteen at once. When a whole board goes red, people don't trim it — they close the app.

One to three is the working range, and three is the ceiling rather than the target. You're not choosing what you want your life to look like; you're choosing what will still happen on the worst day of the month. Add a fourth only once the first runs without your attention.

Creating your first habit

When you open Keel, you'll see the Today view. Tap the + button to create your first habit.

Name it at the size you'll actually do

Give the habit a name that is specific and small enough to be non-negotiable:

"Walk 10 minutes" ✓
"Exercise" ✗ (too broad — what counts?)
"Read one page" ✓
"Read more" ✗ (no finish line)

Then pick an emoji and colour. That's not decoration — you'll be scanning the list at 07:00, and a shape you recognise gets checked off faster than text you have to read.

Pick the bad-day version

Whatever you have in mind, halve it twice. What goes into Keel should be the version you could do while ill, travelling, or after a five-hour meeting day.

This is the two-minute rule: commit to the smallest recognisable unit of the thing, permanently. "20 minutes of yoga" becomes "unroll the mat, do one stretch." You'll usually do more; on the days you don't, the pattern holds, and the pattern is the asset.

If you routinely blow past the small version, leave the name alone. A habit you exceed is healthy; one you renegotiate every morning is not.

Set the schedule

Choose which days it runs (every day, weekdays, Mon/Wed/Fri) and a part of day — morning, afternoon, evening, or anytime. Habits then appear on the right days by themselves; you never re-enter them week to week.

Daily habits are easier to build than three-days-a-week habits, even though they're more work: the cue fires at the same time every day, so there's no "was today one of the days?" decision. If a habit can't be daily, pick fixed weekdays rather than "three times a week." Pick anytime when it has no natural hour — it'll sit in the unplanned list instead of claiming a slot.

Add one goal

Goals answer "why am I doing this?" Create one — "Feel more energetic," "Finish the dissertation" — add a short vision statement if it helps, and link the habit to it while creating or editing it. One goal can collect several habits:

Goal	Habits
Feel more energetic	Morning walk, lights out by 23:00, water with lunch
Learn Spanish	10 min Duolingo, one podcast episode, flashcards

The point isn't tidiness. When the week gets crowded and something has to be cut, the goal link tells you which habit is load-bearing and which you adopted because it sounded good.

Scheduling habits alongside tasks

Habits and tasks live on the same planner in Keel, but they get there differently — see habits vs tasks for the full distinction.

Under the hood, what you're doing and when you're doing it are separate. The habit or task holds the what; a day plan entry holds the when. So:

A habit's part of day gives it a default slot (morning around 07:00, afternoon around noon, evening around 18:00).
Drag it to a specific hour on a specific day and that placement wins over the default.
Drag it back to the unplanned panel and it loses the fixed time without losing the habit.
Tasks work the same way: a task carries a date, and dropping it into an hour slot schedules it. Moving it later moves it — it never duplicates.

Plan habits first and fit tasks into the gaps: habits are the fixed frame of the week, tasks are what you pour into it. The daily planning guide covers the weekly pass, and if you'd rather not place things by hand, the AI planner distributes tasks around habits you've already scheduled.

Day one after a miss

You will miss a day in the first two weeks. This is the part of onboarding that decides whether Keel sticks, so decide now what you'll do.

The rule is never miss twice. One miss is noise. Two in a row is the beginning of a different habit — the habit of not doing it. Concretely:

Don't backfill or "make up" yesterday. Yesterday is closed.
Do the two-minute version today, at the earliest slot available, even if it's 22:50 and it's one push-up.
If a habit is genuinely off — you're ill, or travelling — use Skip Today rather than leaving it unmarked. A skip is an honest record; an unmarked day is a lie you'll misread next week.
If the same habit is skipped three weeks running, the habit is wrong, not you. Shrink it or move it to a different part of day.

Keel doesn't punish the miss. Streak counters are built to make one bad day feel like a total loss, which is exactly when people quit — why streaks don't work covers the mechanism. Watch your bounce-back rate instead: how often you return the very next day. Returning inside 24 hours is what a durable habit looks like from outside; a 40-day streak followed by three weeks of nothing is not.

The iOS app computes this for you on the Progress tab, per habit and averaged across all of them, and groups the result into bands — roughly 40–60% is still building, 60–80% is strong, and above 80% you are recovering from almost every miss you have. Don't read it daily. It only means something across four to six weeks, because a rate calculated from two misses is noise.

Your first two weeks

Day 1: one habit, one goal, bad-day size, scheduled.
Days 2-7: open Keel once a day and mark what happened, misses included. That's the whole job.
End of week 1: did it happen at least four times? If not, the habit is too big or the hour is wrong — change one of those, not both.
Week 2: add a second habit only if the first is running, and do a five-minute pass over the week ahead, dropping tasks into the gaps.

Perfection isn't the target and never was. Something you still do in six months is.