How to use My Abode

My Abode is the third tab in SparkDay when you're on your own. It does two things: it keeps the small upkeep of your home from piling up, and — on Plus — it gives you one five-minute exercise a day on something you'd actually like to be better at.

If you later add family members, this same tab becomes Our Family and the board turns into a shared one. Nothing you set up here is lost when that happens.

1. Setting it up

The first time you open the tab you'll see "What are you keeping up?" and the instruction "Pick two. One about your space, one about you."

1. Your space is already chosen. Tranquil space is selected for you, because it's the one everybody wants and there's nothing to decide. SparkDay fills in the chores that keep a place calm, so you never start at an empty screen.
2. Pick something you're growing. Three areas, all deliberately light — this is not career training.
3. Tap Set up my abode. That's the whole setup. Everything below happens on one screen from then on.

Personal development is part of Plus. On Free you'll see a note saying so — your tranquil space still works completely, and you can add a growth area whenever you like.

Challenges stay between 5 and 10 minutes. Change or skip any of them, any day.

That line on the setup screen is a design constraint rather than a slogan. No exercise in the app runs longer than ten minutes.

2. Your tranquil space

What you start with

Seven chores, already set up, on sensible rhythms:

Nothing here is a to-do list you have to build first. Open the tab and there's already something to tick.

Swapping one you don't need

Tap any chore row to swap it for a different one. No plants? A flat with no floors worth vacuuming? One tap replaces it from a pool of alternatives — wipe the bathroom sink, change the sheets, sort the mail, tidy the entryway, empty the dishwasher, and more.

Adding your own

Tap the ＋ button, bottom right. The sheet is short on purpose:

1. What is it — type it, or tap a suggestion.
2. Effort — leave it on Work it out and SparkDay judges it from the title, or set ★ / ★★ / ★★★ yourself. Effort is what the chore is worth in sparks, so a deep clean pays more than emptying a bin.
3. Repeats — Once, Daily or Weekly.
4. Tap Add it.

Marking things done

Tick the checkbox, or swipe the row right. Done chores drop into a Done today section rather than vanishing, so the screen shows what you got through and not only what's left.

3. Sparks, streak and stickers

Three numbers sit at the top of the screen.

Sparks banked — your running total. Every completed chore pays its effort: ★ is one spark, ★★★ is three. Sparks accumulate on Free as well as Plus, so nothing is lost by waiting to upgrade.

Day streak — how many separate days you've completed something recently. It counts days, not chores, so five things on Tuesday and nothing on Wednesday breaks it exactly as one thing on Tuesday would. It measures showing up.

Stickers — small awards for patterns rather than totals: a first completion, an early-morning run, a comeback week. They arrive on their own; there's nothing to claim.

4. Personal development Plus

One five-minute exercise a day. It is not a course, a test, or a skills assessment — there's no score, no ranking, and nothing to pass.

What one rep looks like

1. Tap the green card on your abode screen. It reads "A moment you'd usually fumble — rehearsed in private."
2. You get a scene. A short, ordinary situation — a colleague dropping work on you at five, someone doing you a favour — with one line the other person says and one clear goal, such as "Decline without apologising twice." Each area has five scenes across three difficulty levels.
3. You answer. Type it, or tap the microphone and say it out loud. Saying it aloud is closer to the real thing and takes ten seconds — but typing works exactly the same way and goes to exactly the same place.
4. You get a reply. Warm, honest and short — see below.
5. You say how it felt. Awkward, Okay or Natural. Three taps, no scale out of ten.
6. You choose tomorrow. Yes, Harder or Different. Asking for harder steps you up a level; skipping twice in a row steps you back down. You set the pace.

What comes back

• What worked — one or two plain sentences about the thing you did well. If your answer missed the point of the scene, this changes tone rather than inventing praise: "Um… let's try differently this time. The idea is…" followed by the single most important thing your answer needed to do. Never a telling-off, and never a line-by-line critique.
• One thing to try — an alternative sentence, written so you could say it out loud word for word.
• Or, lighter — the same thing said more warmly, when there's a warmer way.
• Out in the real world — one small thing to try before your next rep. Always reversible, where the worst outcome is one slightly awkward minute. Never anything that could affect your job, your home, your money or a relationship.

The Sunday read

Once you've built up a few reps, See this week's read shows Over the last four weeks:

• Scenes you're running — level 1 → 3, if you've been asking for harder
• Taken into the real world — 3 of 4, when you've said you tried the challenges
• Felt natural — 2 of 4, from your own mood taps

Every line traces back to something you actually did. Nothing is inferred, so nothing can be quietly wrong.

5. Loops — the things that keep life running

Loops are the other kind of upkeep — not keeping your home tidy, but keeping life running. Gutters. The HVAC filter. The dentist. Car service. They run on long intervals, and forgetting one costs real money.

They're a separate, free feature that lives on the Tasks screen (Schedule tab → Tasks & Loops), not in My Abode. But My Abode is usually where you'll notice one: if a loop is overdue, a banner appears at the top of your abode screen — "Gutters is overdue · 12 days past". Tap it and you go straight to Tasks.

That banner is deliberately a doorway and not a list. There's no "done" button on it, because acting on a loop belongs on the screen where you can see the consequences.

How a loop works

A loop is one date plus a rhythm. There are no occurrences and you can't be late twice — marking it done moves the anchor to today and the ring starts over.

1. Name it — "What keeps life running? e.g. Gutter cleaning"
2. Set the rhythm — every N weeks or months, anything from 1 to 120.
3. Pick the first due date — the real date you last did it, or the next date it's due. This is the anchor the loop counts from.
4. Tap Start loop.

When it's due, the card offers Do it. When it's overdue, it offers Did it — restart from today and Skip this round.

SparkDay will also suggest loops. If you have a recurring monthly, quarterly or yearly item on your schedule, Tasks offers to turn it into one — "repeats on a schedule — make it a loop?" It never converts anything behind your back, because a scheduled repeat and a loop mean different things.

6. What's free and what's Plus

Sparks keep accruing on Free even though some of the layers on top are locked, so upgrading is never lossy — your total is waiting for you.

7. Your privacy

Your practice answers are not stored. When you type or speak a reply it is sent once, read, and discarded when the guidance appears. There's no transcript and no history of what you said.

The exception is deliberate, and yours. Save the phrase keeps a line because you chose to keep it.

Speaking is the same as typing. Voice input becomes text on your device and travels the same path as anything you type. No audio leaves your phone as audio.

What is kept is only what you'd expect to see on your own screen: which scenes you ran, how you said each one felt, whether you tried the real-world challenge, and your chore completions. That's what the Sunday read is built from — and it's why every line on it traces to something you did.

8. Common questions