First Steps After Installation

Your first 15 minutes inside Time Garden — what to click, what to ignore, and what to come back to once you have momentum.

You've downloaded Time Garden and opened it for the first time. The introduction modal greeted you. A daily note is sitting there. Now what?

This page is your first 15 minutes in Time Garden — what to click, what to ignore, and what to come back to later.

1. Write something in today's daily note

You don't need to know everything to start. Just write a sentence. Something you did, something you're feeling, something you noticed. The whole system rewards momentum — and momentum starts with one line.

Don't worry about the buttons yet.

The Wheel of Life, the AI buttons, the rating slider — none of it is required. They become valuable once you've got a few entries banked.

2. Set a rating for today

Find the rating bar near the top of your daily note. Drag it to whatever feels honest for the day. That single number powers half of Time Garden's visualizations — your weekly bar charts, your monthly trend, your yearly overview. It's the cheapest, highest-leverage habit in the whole system.

(More on this on the The Rating System page.)

3. Drop a picture in (optional but lovely)

The "📁 Pictures" section auto-collects any image you embed there. Drag a photo from your desktop straight into that block. It'll appear in:

This daily note
The week's gallery
The month's gallery
The quarter's and year's galleries

Without you doing anything else. (See The Picture Gallery.)

4. Quick-tap a thought into Logs

Below the rating you'll see three little buttons: Highlight, Idea, Progress. These are your "drop-it-and-forget-it" buckets. Anything you tag as a #highlight here will show up in the week's Highlights summary, the month's, the quarter's, and beyond.

The full breakdown lives at Quick Notes — Highlights, Ideas, Progress.

5. Take a peek at the Welcome Dashboard

Click 00 Dashboard → Welcome in the file explorer on the left. This is your home base — it auto-displays today's date and a link to your current week. You can pin this tab and treat it as your Time Garden home page.

(Full tour at The Welcome Dashboard.)

6. Don't customize anything yet

Resist the urge to tinker.

The single biggest mistake new Time Garden users make is opening every settings panel before they've made five daily entries. The defaults are the result of hundreds of hours of tuning. Live with them for a week, then come back and adjust.

If you want to see where everything is, browse the Tweaking Time Garden section in the sidebar — start with Changing Daily Note Opening on Startup or Understanding the CSS-Snippets. But touch nothing yet.

7. Come back tomorrow

Time Garden is built for tomorrow-you. The whole point is the layers — and the second layer (your weekly note) only starts getting interesting once you have two or three dailies feeding into it.

Set yourself one small streak goal.

Open Time Garden every day for one week. Write one line. Set one rating. That's it. By the end of week one, your weekly note will be alive with auto-generated charts, lists, and summaries — and you'll get why people stick with this thing.