Activity types
Not everything you do is a habit to form. YouReach has four activity types, and every one of them belongs to a goal.
What they share
- A goal is required. Tasks, habits, rituals, and Sprints are linked to a parent goal and show up under that goal’s associated activities.
- Difficulty is 1 to 5 — Trivial, Easy, Moderate, Challenging, Hard. It changes how heavily the activity weighs in Goal Score, not whether you finished it.
- Categories group and filter activities. On habits they also suggest a policy. On tasks, rituals, and Sprints they are labels only.
- Schedule phases are Pending (not started yet), Started, and — for a habit, ritual, or Sprint with an end date — Ended. Ended means the schedule is over. It is not the same as a habit becoming Established or a task being completed.
- Today Focus lists what is due now across all four types, and what is coming next.
An activity that has not started yet does not move Goal Score. Once it has started, it can, including after the schedule ends.
Habits
A habit is a recurring behavior you want to form and then keep. It is the only type with formation stages, a policy, and Strength.
The schedule can be daily, weekly, or sparser. Choosing “track formation” is what makes it a habit. Open-ended is the usual shape. A short finite run that cannot reach Established is a Sprint instead.
Good fits: daily meditation or exercise, weekly meal prep, or any cadence where consistency itself is the point.
Tasks
A task is a one-time action. It is pending until its start date, then open until you complete it. There is no separate “start” button — the start date does that.
A due date is optional. If it passes, the task is overdue, and that is informational: it still counts toward the goal, and you can complete it whenever you can. Completing a task sets its contribution to Goal Score to done. Marking it incomplete sets that contribution back to not done.
Archiving a task you never completed removes it from the score. Archiving one you did complete keeps that completion in the score.
Rituals
A ritual is a recurring practice without formation pressure. It has no policy, no Strength, no probation, and no lapse. Any cadence works, from daily to yearly or a custom interval. When you create one, the schedule is open-ended.
A ritual has its own Score: how many expected dates you completed, softened early on so a new ritual is not judged only by its first few dates. A streak is shown on the ritual and does not enter that Score. The Score does feed the parent goal.
Good fits: a monthly review, a quarterly check-in, an annual tradition, a birthday, or a seasonal job such as tax filing — anything you want to remember and mark done, without forming a habit.
Sprints
A Sprint is a recurring commitment with a fixed end. Like a ritual, it does not use habit formation, Strength, or probation. Unlike a ritual, the end is on from the start, so the horizon is finite. New Sprints default to 10 occurrences.
Sprint Score is the share of planned occurrences you completed across that whole horizon. It keeps updating while the Sprint is underway. When the schedule ends, or you archive it, the Score freezes at the result you had. Extending an ended Sprint makes it live again.
Use a Sprint for a time-boxed push — a two-week practice block, a short challenge — and convert it to a habit later if you want open-ended formation. You can convert the other way only while a habit is still Forming.
Which one to use
- Habit — you want the behavior to become Formed, then Established, under a policy you choose.
- Task — it happens once, and then it is done.
- Ritual — it repeats, and you want a completion record without formation rules.
- Sprint — it repeats, but only until a known end.
On a goal, open work means something is still unfinished: an incomplete task, a habit that is not yet Established, a ritual whose schedule is still open, or a Sprint that has not ended. Marking a goal achieved asks you to confirm if any of that is still open.