Upkeep: The Things That Aren’t Daily

Training runs on a session clock and nutrition runs on a daily one. Plenty of looking after yourself runs on neither: a dentist twice a year, a haircut every six weeks, brush heads every three months. Upkeep is the part of the app that holds that clock.

How the clock works

Each item has a cadence and a next-due date. When you are late, the next due date re-anchors from when you did it, rather than from the schedule it was supposed to be on.

Brush heads every 90 days, changed on day 104? The next one is due 90 days after day 104. There is exactly one next-due per item at any time, so a fortnight away does not come back as a stack of missed occurrences waiting to be cleared.

Packs, and editing what they give you

Rather than starting from an empty list, you switch on the packs that apply to you and edit from there. Oral covers brushing, floss, brush heads and the dentist. Grooming covers nails, haircuts and blades. Clinical covers the appointments and screenings you don't want to forget. There are packs for hair, skin, environment (pillowcases, towels, filters) and longevity protocols too.

Every seeded item is yours once it lands: change the cadence, rename it, or delete it. An item belongs to exactly one pack, so switching on two overlapping packs can't leave you with two rows for the same job.

When, as well as how often

A cadence answers how often. Some things also need when: "every day" tells you little about a nap without a target time. Items that need one carry a local wall-clock time, stored as you typed it, so travelling does not drag your evening routine into the small hours.

A few clock-driven protocols repeat on a fixed interval instead, and can be shorter than a day. They are the exception: a named time of day copes with a day that runs late better than a fixed interval does.

Habits you are breaking

A habit you are breaking runs the same clock inverted. It has no cadence and nothing to complete: the app counts days since the last one. You can backdate your start, because a quit date is history rather than a log entry.

Where the evidence supports it, a habit carries the documented recovery timeline behind quitting: what the literature says happens after the last one, cited and dated from your own start. It describes what has been documented and makes no prediction about you.

A relapse is logged without a score, a lost streak or a best run to fall short of, and no leaderboard can read it. The count restarts and the app says so plainly.

Where to go next

• MuscleBuddy 101
• Health, recovery and your muscle rank
• What the Health module covers