How to use Check Yeah.

Why it’s built this way

Check Yeah was built by an ADHD brain that had downloaded and deleted twenty planners. Every one of them assumed the same things: that you would open the app at the right time, that a missed day should cost you something, and that a reminder at 9:00 is a reminder. None of that is true for a lot of us. So the app is organised around three beliefs.

• Missing a day is information, not failure. A streak that resets to zero teaches you to quit the moment you slip. Here, a rest day keeps the chain whole, and an unfinished today has not cost you anything yet. There is no red X anywhere in the app.
• Context beats the clock. Time blindness means “9:00” is an abstraction. “After coffee” is a real moment you will recognise when it arrives. Reminders attach to your routine, and the app works out the time.
• Capture first, organise never. The thought you have in the car is gone by the time you park. One-offs exist so you can say it to your phone in three seconds and trust it to show up on the right day. No projects, no priorities, no inbox to process.
• The app should not need opening. Out of sight is out of mind; that is not a saying for us, it is a description. So the widget is not an extra. It is the front door: your habits sit on the home screen or lock screen where you will see them twenty times a day, and a check-off is one tap right there. Most of the time you never open the app at all.

One more thing that runs through everything: opening the app counts. The first time you open it each day, Today says so. That is not a gimmick; showing up is the step most of us get stuck on.

Getting started

The first time you sign in, a short setup walks you through one habit: pick it, place it in your day, decide whether you want nudges. By the time it is done, Today already has something on it. You can run it again any time from Settings → Capture from anywhere → Show me around again.

Pick something embarrassingly small for the first one. “Drink a glass of water” is a better first habit than “Exercise”, because the point of the first week is to learn the check-off reflex, not to change your life. The bigger habits come later, once the app is part of the furniture.

Then, before you do anything else, put the widget on your home screen. On iPhone, long-press the home screen, tap +, search for Check Yeah, and pick the medium size; add the lock-screen one too. On Android, long-press the home screen, choose Widgets, and drag Check Yeah on. The app works without the widget in the way a car works without wheels: technically, and not for long.

Today

Today is the home screen and the only screen most people need. It lists what is scheduled for today, grouped into Morning, Midday, Evening and Anytime by when each reminder lands. One-offs due today sit in the same list.

• Tap the circle to check something off. A small celebration follows, unless you have turned those off.
• Tap the name to open and edit the habit.
• Long-press a habit to take a rest day for just that habit. Long-press a one-off to turn it into a habit or drop it.
• The pills at the top are shortcuts: Jot it down for a one-off, Brain check-in until you have logged today, and Take a rest day for the whole day.

When everything is done, Today says so and gets out of the way. When nothing is scheduled, it says that too. Pull down to sync if you have been using another device.

Habits

A habit is anything you want to repeat. Each one has a name, an icon, a colour, a schedule (every day, or pick the days), and optionally a reminder. The Habits tab lists all of them, plus your one-offs under Up next and anything you have archived.

• Archive, don’t delete. Archiving moves a habit out of the way but keeps its history. Restore it later from the Archived section when the season for it comes back.
• Pick days is for things like a weekly call or a gym day. Days you did not pick are simply skipped; they do not count against you.
• The free plan keeps things calm with 5 active habits. One-offs never count towards that; capture should never hit a paywall.

Streaks and rest days

A streak counts the scheduled days you kept in a row. A day is kept if you checked the habit off or took a rest day for it. Days the habit was not scheduled are skipped, not broken. And today, while it is still unfinished, is not counted against you; the app just says “ready when you are”.

A rest day is a deliberate decision to not do the thing today without losing the chain. You can take one for a single habit (long-press it) or for the whole day (the Take a rest day pill on Today). The free plan includes 1 rest day a week; Premium has no limit.

Why have rest days at all, instead of streaks that simply never break? Because a streak is only motivating if it is true. “I kept this going for 30 days, and two of them were rest days I chose” is a real achievement you can feel. A number that goes up no matter what you do stops meaning anything, and you stop looking at it.

Reminders: context over clock

When you add a reminder you do not pick a time; you pick a moment in your routine: when I wake up, with morning coffee, after lunch, when I finish work, at bedtime, and so on. The app translates that into a time using the routine times in Settings → Reminders → Your routine. Change “after lunch” from 1:15 to 12:30 once, and every habit anchored to it moves with it.

This is the feature that feels odd on day one and obvious by day three. A clock time is something you argue with. A routine moment is something you notice happening, and the nudge arrives while you are already there.

• A specific time is always available too, for the things that genuinely are about the clock.
• When I get home / when I leave home (Premium, phone only) use your home location, which is stored on your phone and never sent anywhere.
• The free plan includes wake up, after lunch, bedtime and specific times; the rest of the routine moments are Premium.
• A reminder clears itself the moment you check the habit off, including from the widget.

One-offs

A one-off is a thing you need to do once: call the vet, pick up the parcel, reply to Sam. Tap Jot it down on Today, say or type a few words, done. It lands on Today, or on the day you named: “tomorrow”, “Friday”, “when I get home” all work. You check it, it disappears.

• Unchecked one-offs carry forward quietly. No overdue count, no red, no pile. It is simply still here tomorrow, with a small “from Monday” tag.
• Long-press a one-off to turn it into a habit (when “water the plants” turns out to be a weekly thing) or to drop it without guilt.
• Everything you have jotted for later is listed under Up next on the Habits tab.
• Unlimited, on every plan.

The real trick is capturing without opening the app: Siri, the widget’s Jot button, the share sheet, the Android Quick Settings tile. They are all on the capture page.

Brain check-in

Once a day, on the Brain tab, tap your energy and focus (five levels each), flip whether you took your meds, and add a note if you like. It saves itself. After a couple of weeks, the chart underneath shows how much of what you scheduled you actually did at each energy level.

That chart is the point. Most of us judge a bad week as a character flaw. The data usually says something kinder and more useful: low-energy days are low-completion days, for everyone. Patterns, not verdicts. One-offs are left out of it, because a one-off says nothing about your routine.

This is health-adjacent information, so it gets special treatment: it is only ever used to show you your own patterns, it is never shared, and it is never used for anything else. The privacy policy puts that in writing.

The timer

The Timer tab exists for one problem: starting. Pick 2, 5, 10 minutes, optionally link it to a habit, and press go. When the time is up you are allowed to stop. Usually you will not, because starting was the hard part, and the timer’s job was to make the start small enough to agree to.

AI micro-steps

Open a habit and tap Break it down with AI (Premium). Type the task that has you stuck, “clean the kitchen”, and you get five tiny, concrete first steps, the kind you would get from a friend standing next to you: “put the dishes in the sink”, not “develop a cleaning routine”. Tick them off as you go.

Only the task text you type is sent to the AI provider; nothing else about you goes with it, and it is not used to train anything.

Low-stimulation mode and other comfort settings

Settings → Sensory has three switches that change how the app feels rather than what it does.

• Low-stimulation mode turns off confetti, sounds and haptics, flattens the colours, and shortens animations. It also quietens the app in other ways: no extra prompts, no rating request. For the days when everything is Too Much.
• Dyslexia-friendly font swaps the typeface app-wide.
• Theme: light, dark, or follow the system.

These settings follow your account, so the web app and your phone stay in step.

Widgets, lock screen, and the web app

If you take one thing from this guide: use the widget. An ADHD brain does not go looking for an app; the app has to be in the way. The widget puts today’s habits where your eyes already land, and turns a check-off into a single tap with no app launch, no loading, no chance to get distracted on the way. People who use the widget keep using Check Yeah. People who do not, mostly do not. That is the whole pattern.

• iPhone: small, medium and large home-screen widgets, and lock-screen widgets. Tap a habit on the widget to check it off without opening the app. The medium and large sizes have a Jot it down button. Habits are listed in the order you would do them.
• Android: a resizable, scrollable widget with the same tap-to-check-off, plus a Quick Settings tile for jotting.
• Web: checkyeah.app is the same app with the same account. Useful at a desk, and the easiest place to set up a batch of habits with a real keyboard.

Free and Premium

Free is a complete app, not a trial: habits, one-offs, streaks, rest days, reminders, brain check-in, timer, widgets, web. Premium removes the limits and adds the extras, for $4.99 / month or $39.99 / year.

Subscriptions are handled by the App Store or Google Play; we never see your card.

Best practices

The patterns that keep showing up in people for whom the app sticks.

1. Widget on the home screen, day one. Not optional. Lock screen too, if your phone has it. Everything else on this list works better when the habits are in front of you without opening anything.
2. Start with three habits, all small. Boringly achievable for two weeks. Then add. The app will not stop you adding ten on day one; your brain will.
3. Anchor every habit to something you already do. “With morning coffee” works because the coffee is already happening. A habit that needs its own new moment in the day has two things to remember instead of one.
4. Check off in the moment, from the widget. Batch-checking at night is where streaks go to die, because you will forget whether you did it. Tap it while the glass is still in your hand.
5. Take rest days on purpose, early. A chosen rest day is a win for self-knowledge. A missed day that turns into a rest day at 11pm is fine too, but the morning version feels better.
6. Jot everything. Review nothing. One-offs are a net, not a system. Let them carry forward; drop the ones that stop mattering.
7. Log your brain state for two weeks before judging yourself. The chart is the only honest answer to “why was this week so bad?”
8. Archive what is not working. A habit you have skipped for three weeks is not a failure, it is the wrong habit for this month. Archive it and keep the history.
9. Use low-stimulation mode as a setting, not a confession. Flip it on for a day whenever the celebrations grate. Flip it off when they help again.

Your data, and getting help

No ads, nothing sold, no trackers inside the app. Your location stays on your phone. Delete your account from Settings any time and everything goes with it. The short version is on the privacy page.

Stuck, or found something broken? Email support@checkyeah.app. It goes to Rick Brown, who builds the app and reads every message. What has shipped and what is coming is on the changelog.