Getting started
Create your first mountain, add a vein, and clear your first daily floor.
This page walks you from a fresh account to your first day of carving. It takes a few minutes.
1. Create a mountain
A mountain is one of the big things you care about. Keep it broad. "Get fit", "Ship the side project", "Read more" are all good mountains.
From your dashboard, choose New mountain, give it a name, and save. You do not need to get the name perfect. You can rename it later, and most people end up with three or four mountains rather than a dozen.
2. Add a vein
A mountain on its own does not give you anything to do today. That comes from its veins.
Open your new mountain and choose Add vein. A vein is the concrete, repeatable thing you will actually do. Under "Get fit" you might add "Run" or "Strength training". Under "Ship the side project" you might add "Write code".
When you add a vein you pick how it is measured. This is the metric:
- Time -- you track minutes or hours. Good for "Practice piano" or "Deep work".
- Quantity -- you track a count. Good for "Words written" or "Pages read".
- Daily -- you just mark it done for the day. Good for "Take medication" or "Make the bed".
See The three metrics for more on choosing.
3. Set the daily floor
For time and quantity veins, you set a daily floor: the smallest amount you commit to each day. Twenty minutes of running. Two hundred words. The floor is deliberately low. It is the line you do not let yourself drop below, not the most you can do.
For daily veins, the floor is simply showing up once that day.
The daily floor covers how the floor is derived from a target and a deadline, and how the cross-section graph shows your progress.
4. Carve
Carving is logging progress on a vein. Open a vein and record what you did: minutes spent, the count you hit, or a tap to mark the day done. As soon as you clear the floor, that day counts.
You can also carve by replying to Geo over Telegram. See Geo and Telegram.
5. Let Geo keep watch
Once you have a floor set, Geo starts paying attention. If the day is running out and you have not cleared a floor, Geo nudges you. At the end of the week, Geo writes a short, plain review of how it went. You do not have to configure any of this to get started, but you can tune when and how Geo reaches you in your settings.
That is the loop
Create a mountain, add veins, set small floors, clear them most days. The mountain does not move all at once. It moves a little every day, and that is the point.