How to use asambl

Your home screen

The dashboard is the first thing you see when you open asambl. It gives you a snapshot of your day and week at a glance so you can decide what needs attention right now.

You will see your daily habit progress, upcoming tasks and events, recent plans, and a quick overview of how each life area is doing. If something needs your attention, it shows up here first.

The action button

In the bottom-right corner of every screen you will find a small circular button with a + icon. This is the quickest way to do the three things you will do most often in asambl.

Tap it and you get three options:

• Capture. Jot down a thought, idea, or to-do without leaving what you are doing.
• Check-in. Open your daily habit tracker and log how your day is going.
• Plan Week. Launch the weekly planning wizard to set up your week ahead.

If you have already completed your daily check-in, a small green dot appears next to the Check-in option so you know it is done.

Capturing thoughts

Quick Capture is a lightweight note-taking panel that pops up when you tap Capture from the action button. It is designed for speed: type what is on your mind, pick where it should go, and save.

By default everything lands in your inbox, but you can choose a specific life area (like health or finance) if you already know where it belongs. You can also add tags like idea, todo, question, or follow-up to help you find it later.

Press Cmd + Enter to save quickly without reaching for the mouse.

Adding structured entries

While Quick Capture is for free-form notes, Quick Entry is for structured data: things like a workout log, a financial transaction, or a relationship touchpoint. The form fields change depending on the type of entry you pick.

For example, logging a workout gives you fields for exercise name, sets, reps, and notes. Logging a purchase gives you currency, amount, and category fields. Each life area has its own set of entry types tailored to the kind of data it tracks.

You can hit Save & New to keep adding entries in a row without closing the panel.

Daily check-in and habits

The daily check-in is a short ritual you can do each day to track the habits and routines that matter to you. Open it from the action button or from the dashboard.

Each habit can be one of three types:

• Yes / No. Simple toggle. Did you do it today or not?
• Scale. Rate something from 1 to 5 (or up to 7). Great for tracking energy, mood, or sleep quality.
• Quantity. Enter a number with a custom unit, like glasses of water or minutes of reading.

Each habit shows its current streak, so you can see how many days in a row you have kept it going. The dashboard also shows your overall completion for the day, broken down by life area.

Your inbox

Everything you capture ends up in your inbox until you decide what to do with it. Think of it as a triage center: you open each item, read it, and either file it to the right life area, mark it as done, or delete it.

You can filter between All, Unread, and Done items. If you file something by mistake, there is an undo button that tracks your last 20 actions so you can reverse course quickly.

The inbox badge in the sidebar shows how many unread items are waiting, so you always know when something needs your attention.

Weekly planner

The weekly planner is a step-by-step wizard that walks you through setting up your week ahead. It gathers your priorities, commitments, and energy levels, then helps you create a plan you can follow.

The wizard asks you a few questions for each life area you have turned on. Once you have answered everything, you get a review screen that pulls it all together. You can adjust anything before confirming.

If AI is turned on, asambl uses your answers to draft a detailed weekly plan. You review it, edit anything that does not feel right, and then commit. If AI is off, the wizard still organizes your inputs into a structured plan you can work from.

Calendar

The calendar shows your events and planned activities in month, week, or day view. Events are colour-coded by life area so you can see at a glance how your time is distributed.

You can create and edit events directly, drag them to reschedule, and set up recurring events. If you connect Google Calendar, your external events show up here too.

The calendar also shows a breakdown of how much time you are spending on each life area, which helps you spot imbalances before they become a problem.

Your plans

Every plan you create (weekly, monthly, or for a specific life area) is saved here. You can browse them by date or by life area, pin your favourites, and archive old ones.

Click any plan to read it in full. Plans are stored as plain text files on your computer, so you can also open them in any text editor if you prefer.

Browsing your files

All your data in asambl is stored as plain Markdown files in a folder on your computer. The library is a built-in file browser that lets you navigate these files without leaving the app.

You can browse by folder, open any file to read or edit it, and see how your content is organized. Since everything is standard Markdown, you can also browse the same folder in Finder, VS Code, or any other tool you like.

Search

Full-text search across all your files. Type a word or phrase and asambl finds every matching note, plan, and entry instantly.

Search also remembers your recent queries and lets you save frequently used searches for quick access. Click any result to open it with the matching text highlighted.

Ask asambl

Ask asambl is a conversational AI assistant built into the app. Open it from the sidebar or with a keyboard shortcut and ask questions about your week, your habits, your goals, or anything else the app knows about.

It has access to your plans, check-ins, and life area data, so it can give you answers that are specific to your situation. You can ask things like “How are my habits going this week?”, “Help me plan my day”, or “What should I focus on next?”

The panel also suggests prompts based on the time of day and which life areas you have turned on. In the morning you might see “Plan my day”; in the evening, “Reflect on my day”.

You can keep multiple conversations going at once and search through past threads. If you are reviewing a plan and want to dig deeper, you can open a conversation right from the plan itself.

Settings

Settings is where you configure asambl to work the way you want. The most important sections are:

• AI Integration. Choose your AI provider and model, or turn AI off entirely.
• Life Areas. Install or remove the life areas you want to track.
• Scheduling. Set your peak energy times and deep work preferences so plans account for when you work best.
• Integrations. Connect Google Calendar and other services.
• Data. Export your data, back up your files, or run maintenance tasks.