Get started
Planet4.Me is a shared household app. Everyone in the household sees the same lists, to-dos and notes on their own phone, and anything anyone adds appears for everyone. This page takes you from nothing to a household with two people in it, in about five minutes.
Sign in
Tap Sign in at the top of this site — or open planet4.me/signin — and sign in with Google. It is the only way in, on purpose: there is no password to invent, no email to verify and no account to recover. Signing in creates a household of your own — a workspace called My household, renameable in Settings — so you can start using the app before anyone else joins.
Get going. Your first Home carries a short card with the three first moves — Write a note, Put something on the grocery list, Bring the household in — each a door to the thing itself, and ticked once it has happened. It stays on Personal while you start using the app, until all three have happened or you hide it.
This guide is the app's front door: opening planet4.me while signed out brings you here, and once you are signed in it opens straight into the app. To read the guide again from inside the app, open More, then Help; Open the app at the top of any page here takes you back.
Put it on your phone
Planet4.Me is a web app you install from the browser rather than an app store, and installed it opens full screen like any other app.
- iPhone or iPad. With the app open in Safari — signed in, so it is the app and not this guide — tap Share, then Add to Home Screen.
- Android. With the app open in Chrome, signed in, open the browser menu, then Install app (or Add to Home screen).
- A computer. It works in any browser as it is. Chrome and Edge also offer an install button in the address bar.
Nothing changes about the data: installed or not, it is the same account and the same household.
Bring the household in
- Open More, then Settings.
- Tap Share. Share this workspace brings everyone into the one you have been using, lists and all; Start a separate one keeps yours to yourself. Give it a name — "The Smiths", "Flat 4", whatever the household calls itself.
- The Members page opens with an invite link. Send it however you like.
- Anyone who opens the link and signs in with Google joins. There is nothing else to set up.
The link is good for a week. From Members you can replace it with a fresh one or withdraw it, and whoever started the workspace can remove a member. Everyone else can leave from the same page. See Households and workspaces for how more than one workspace works.
Find your way around
On a phone there are five tabs along the bottom, left to right — a tablet or a computer has a sidebar instead:
| Tab | What lives there |
|---|---|
| Home | One folder's home as widgets: what needs attention, then its to-dos, questions, notes and people, and at the bottom the rest of the app — the shopping lists, places, the week ahead and the tags in use. Tap the folder's path in the bar at the top to choose it — Home, Notes and To-dos all show the one you choose. The app opens here. |
| Notes | Pages the household keeps — the boiler's model number, what the vet said, the plan for the kitchen. |
| To-dos | Your to-dos, in folders. |
| Search | One box over everything: notes, to-dos, questions, people, places, folders and what is on the lists, from every folder at once. |
| More | Today first — one day from every folder — then six tiles, one for each part of the app without a tab, each saying what is inside: Lists (the Grocery and Household shopping lists, and the regulars that come back on their own), Calendar, People, Tags, Questions and Places. Under them, This account: Settings, Help, Privacy and Sign out. Calendar, People, Tags and Questions show the same folder as Home. |
The + button. A round + sits at the bottom right of every screen that shows the household's things. It offers New note — a blank note, opened, in the folder the top bar shows — New to-do, which takes the to-do's words in a box and then shows it on that folder's to-dos, and Add to a list, which takes a thing to buy with Grocery or Household beside it and adds it without leaving the screen; a line at the bottom says where it went, with a way there. It is not on a note's own page, where the editor owns that corner. On a tablet or a computer the + is at the top of the sidebar instead, with the same three, and the keys N, T and L do the same (below).
Search everything. The Search tab is one box over the whole workspace: notes (the archived ones too), open to-dos, questions, people, places, folders and what is on the shopping lists, from every folder at once. #tag and @name work there as they do everywhere. Results come sorted by kind, a dozen of each, and every row opens the thing where it lives; a note shows the day it was last written and the line your words were found on. Punctuation is forgiven: "wifi" finds "Wi-Fi". On a computer the box is ready to type into as soon as Search opens, and Cmd/Ctrl+K opens it from anywhere. The search box on each screen still looks only at that screen's folder.
Each has its own page in this guide: Home, Lists, To-dos, Notes, Calendar, People, tags and questions, and Places.
On a tablet or a computer
In a window at least 744 pixels wide and 560 tall — a laptop or desktop browser, most tablets — the app lays itself out side by side instead of in tabs: where you are on the left, a list in the middle, and what you opened from it on the right. A phone keeps its tabs whichever way up it is held, and so does a browser window narrowed below that size.
- The sidebar. On a computer, or a tablet on its side, everything the tabs and More hold is down the left in one column. At the top, the workspace — tap it to switch — and the +. Then Search everything, Ask the assistant, Today with how much it holds, Calendar, All to-dos and All notes; your folders, each with a count, a folder with subfolders folding open; under the chosen folder's name, its Home, Notes and To-dos, then its People, Tags and Questions; Grocery and Household with how much is on each, a trip under way, and Receipts, regulars, shops for the rest of Lists; Places; and at the foot Settings, Help, Privacy and the keyboard shortcuts.
- The rail. In a narrower window — a tablet held upright — the sidebar is a rail of the main places instead: the workspace's initial, the +, Home, Notes, To-dos, Today, Calendar, Lists, Search and Ask. More, at its foot, slides the whole sidebar over the page for the rest.
- The list, and what you opened from it. In the middle is the list you are working through: a folder's Home, Notes or To-dos (chosen under the folder's name in the sidebar, or on the rail), All notes, All to-dos, People, a search's results, Settings. Whatever you open from it opens on the right, its row lit in the list so you can see where you are, and the list stays as it was, so the next one is a click away. What you open has no back arrow to that list: the list is right there. Drag the edge between the two to give the list more room or less; double-click the edge to put it back.
- A to-do's own page. On a phone a to-do opens on its row. Here it opens on the right as a page, with its words, its Day, Repeats, Remind me, Mark done, Move to another folder and Pin to home — see To-dos.
- Today, while nothing is open. With nothing open beside a folder's Home, Notes or To-dos (or All notes and All to-dos), the right side is Today, with the week ahead and what is on the lists under it — which is why Home there leaves out its own Lists and Calendar. Beside anything else — Settings, People, Lists, Tags, Questions, Search — the right side says what will open there instead.
- The calendar and Places take the whole width, since nothing opens beside them. The calendar names each day's things in its squares — three to a day, then "+2 more" — where a phone draws a dot.
Keys. While nothing is being typed into: N starts a new note and T a new to-do, in the folder on screen; L adds to a list; Cmd/Ctrl+K goes to Search; Esc closes a sheet, or else closes what is open and goes back to its list; and ? shows them all.
It works without signal
Grocery shops have terrible signal, and the one moment the app has to work is the moment you are standing in one. So whatever anyone writes is saved on their phone at once and syncs when there is signal again. Two small chips in the corner tell you where things stand:
- offline · 3 waiting — the phone has no connection; three changes are saved here and will go when it does. Tap it to see that said in full.
- can't sync — the phone is online, but the app's data cannot be reached. That is nearly always a content blocker or a filtering network, not the app; your data is on screen and correct, and nothing you write is lost.
Tell the app who you are
Names in the app are just names until you claim yours. Once somebody has written @yourname somewhere, open People from Home's People widget, open your own entry and tap This is me. From then on the "Mine" filter on All to-dos, on the calendar and on Questions shows only what names you, and the assistant knows who is typing. Details in People, tags and questions.