Life areas

Life areas are the parts of life asambl plans with you. You choose which ones to add. An area you have not added does not shape your week, so you only carry the context you actually want planned.

The weekly plan is always on

The weekly plan holds your week and your quarter at the centre of asambl. It is always on and cannot be removed. Everything else is optional and arranges itself around it.

The six areas

Add any combination of the six, or none of them. Each has its own page, and they appear in this order on every screen.

• Health: training, recovery, and nutrition.
• Money: spending, fixed costs, savings, and debt.
• Relationships: your partner and your wider circle.
• Joy: leisure, media, and travel.
• Growth: learning, ideas, projects, and decisions.
• Career: the career your job crowds out (a side project, a credential, a pivot, your network), planned outside work hours.

Adding an area tells asambl to plan that part of your life. Leaving it out keeps it out of your week entirely. Your job itself is not an area: its hours and meetings are fixed, and the planners work around them.

Your life picture

Your life picture is the one place for what asambl knows about you: who you are, what this season looks like, your constraints, the people who matter, and what is true in each area you have added. Every plan reads it. Open Life picture in the sidebar to see every fact on file, when it started being true and where it came from. Edit a fact and the next plan uses it; delete one and the planners stop reading it.

Setup asks a few life picture questions for each area you add. You do not need to answer everything at once; an area is useful as soon as it holds the basics, and it gets sharper as you add more.

What an area holds

Beyond your life picture, each area holds the things you log and keep: a session under Health, an expense under Money, a trip under Joy. Each area page leads with that area's part of this week's plan, what is coming up, and how last week went. The Log menu at the top adds an entry, and the area's planner sits underneath, ready for a question. The more you record, the more the planner has to reason about.

Areas and planners are not one to one

Six areas, seven planners in the weekly plan. Relationships runs two, Partner and Social, because your closest relationship and your wider social life need different things from a week. Planning both with one set of rules produces bad weeks for both. You still add and remove Relationships as a single area; the split is in how it is planned, not in what you manage.

Three areas also have a second planner you can ask on their page: Nutrition on Health, Travel on Joy, and Knowledge on Growth. They draft when you ask, not as part of the weekly plan.

Adding and removing areas

You are not locked into your first choices. Open Settings: Add a life area lists the ones you have not added, and each area's own page in Settings has a button to remove it. Removing an area moves its notes to the archive; nothing is deleted, and you can add it back.

To keep an area without planning it every week, set it to Just reserve time or Off in Settings, under Planning.

How an area is stored

Each area keeps its notes as plain Markdown in your data folder, so you can read or back them up outside asambl in Finder or any Markdown editor. Settings, under Data, shows where the folder is.

Two folders carry an area's earlier name: Growth's is Mind and Career's is Work. Some files inside keep older names too, such as Fitness_Profile.md under Health. Your overall profile and your life picture live under 10_System/.

asambl manages these files for you, so editing inside the app keeps everything in step. Some helper files are hidden in the Library by design to keep it tidy. You can still open any file directly in a Markdown editor if you prefer.