How Rolyx works

Rolyx runs one small system: everything you own belongs to a role, each day takes on one large, three medium and five small pieces of work, and a weekly review is where the next week gets decided. Everything else on this page is vocabulary for that system.

Roles

A role is a part of your life you're accountable to: Parent, Employee, Friend. Every task, habit and project belongs to exactly one, which is what stops the system from becoming a flat list where work quietly eats everything else.

Roles are ranked, and the order is a real statement. It's both the order they're listed in within the app on lists, and the order a review walks them in. One role is your default, pre-selected whenever you add something new.

Archiving a role you're not living right now keeps its history but stops it appearing in pickers. Deleting only works once nothing points at it.

The day: 1-3-5

A day has nine slots, in three sizes: one Large, three Mediums, five Smalls.

Sizing is by weight, not importance. How much effort it takes you to do. The caps exist because a day genuinely holds about one hard thing, and a list that pretends otherwise is how you end each day behind.

The caps are a ceiling, not a quota. Finishing three smalls on a day where three smalls is all that existed is a truly finished day. Going over is allowed too. you can absolutley take on two larges if you need to.

Tasks can repeat on fixed dates, floating from completion, or as a frequency (e.g. "once a week") left in a pool until the weekly review places it on a day.

Capture

The add box decides where a line lands by how much you tell it. Type a bare title and hit enter: it's a capture, dropped into that day's inbox, unsorted. Touch any detail (role, size, due date, project, link, repeat) and you've said you mean a task, at which point role and size are both required.

That's the whole rule, and it exists so thinking and sorting stay separate. Nothing is ever silently stamped with a default role and a size you didn't choose. The inbox is emptied during the weekly review, one line at a time, into a task, a project, a note, or the bin.

Someday / Maybe

The incubator: things you might do, held deliberately without a size and without a date. A someday item isn't backlog. The backlog is work you've committed to and just haven't scheduled. Someday is work you haven't agreed to yet. The only way out is tocommit: give it a size, optionally a date, and it becomes an ordinary task.

Projects

A project is an outcome, not a task list. It should be a statement of what "done" looks like with a due date and a role. Tasks are then assigned to it. Every review checks which outcomes are due before the next one and flags the ones with nothing moving.

Habits: floor & target

A habit is one activity with two numbers per week (or per month), not two habits:

• Target - the good week. What you're aiming at.
• Floor - the week you refuse to go below. Non-negotiable, and deliberately low enough to hold on your worst week.

Workout, target 5x, floor 3x. Missing target is information. Missing floor is what the weekly review actually watches. It tells the difference between one miss, two in a row, and a pattern, and lets you attach a reason to a miss. "Away all week" is a different fact from a bare miss, and it's the one thing the diagnostic can't see for itself.

The staging rule

One habit stages at a time, for three weeks, across the whole system. A staging habit is one you're still installing; a solidified one is load-bearing and expected to just hold.

The rule is the point. Adding six habits in one enthusiastic evening is the reliable way to hold none of them, so the system won't let a second habit stage while one is mid-window. Let the three weeks run, solidify it, then start the next.

Notes

Notes live in notebooks and are written in Markdown. A note can be attached to a task, which is where the thinking behind a piece of work goes. Unfiled is a real destination, not a failure state. Getting a thought out of your head and into a note has already done the important part.

Reviews

The weekly review is the forward-looking, load-bearing habit of the whole system. You sit down at the end of one week to lay out the next. It walks six steps:

1. Clear Inbox - every captured line, sorted into something or binned.
2. File Notes - optional; only if you turned it on.
3. Last Week - what got done, and what's still open from it.
4. Role & Habit Check - every role in turn: is anything moving here? Plus every floor, met or missed.
5. Plan the Week - place next week's work onto days.
6. Lock It In.

A role with nothing in it isn't automatically a failure.. You can mark it anintentional pause for that period, which is the difference between a decision and an oversight.

Monthly and quarterly reviews run the same shape over a longer horizon. None of the three are on by default.

System Pause

System Pause is for a genuinely disrupted stretch like an illness, a newborn, or if you're moving. While it's on, the 1-3-5 suspends entirely and the only obligation left standing is the habit floor. It's one global switch, it records why, and it ends at your next weekly review or whenever you end it. It exists so a bad fortnight is something you declare rather than something you fail.