Alongside the Your Wellness dashboard, Onward has four standalone tools for the practices that keep a working week sustainable.
Habits
Habits tracks the small daily things you want to keep doing.
Press Add Habit to open Add New Habit, which takes a Habit Title and an optional Description. Keep titles concrete — "Walk 20 minutes" beats "Exercise more", because you can tell unambiguously whether you did it.
Each habit shows:
- A check for today, which you can also tick from Quick actions on Your Wellness.
- A current streak.
- A heatmap covering the last 365 days.
The heatmap is the part worth looking at. A streak counter only knows about right now, so a single missed day resets it to zero and the number stops being informative. The heatmap shows the whole year at once, where one blank square in an otherwise solid month reads as what it is — a normal gap, not a failure.
Change the selected day to mark a habit complete or incomplete for that day. Edit habit changes the name. Delete habit removes the habit and its tracking. Leaving it unchecked is the way to pause without erasing the heatmap.
Gratitude
Gratitude is a journal for the things worth noting. Entries are filed under a category:
People · Experiences · Things · Personal · Health · Nature · Other
Categories exist so the list stays readable when you have a few hundred entries, and so a pattern can emerge. If six months of entries are almost all Work adjacent and almost none are People or Nature, that's worth knowing.
Gratitude entries are private to you. You can edit an entry, delete it, search the list, filter by tag, and mark a favorite.
Work-Life Boundaries
Work-Life Boundaries is for writing down the limits you intend to hold, and it has two tabs:
- My Boundaries — the ones you've defined. Create Boundary adds one.
- Boundary Tools — help for defining and communicating them.
Boundaries are grouped by type:
| Type | Typical examples |
|---|---|
| Communication | No Slack after 7pm; email checked twice a day |
| Work hours | Hard stop at 6pm; no weekend work |
| Client availability | Calls only Tuesday–Thursday; 24-hour response window |
| Personal | Lunch away from the desk; phone out of the bedroom |
Writing a boundary down does not enforce it — Onward will not block notifications or lock you out of the app. What it does is make the boundary explicit, so that breaking it is a decision you notice rather than a drift you don't.
Mindfulness Center
Mindfulness Center has two parts:
- Guided meditations — a library of sessions.
- Meditation Timer — a plain timer with an optional interval bell: None, Midway Bell, or 5-Minute Intervals.
The timer is deliberately unremarkable. If you already have a practice, you don't need an app to narrate it; you need something that counts and gets out of the way.
Quick wins
Quick wins (also shown as Boosters on Your Wellness) is a list of short, concrete actions you can take right now, filterable by type. They're suggestions drawn from your own patterns rather than generic advice, and they're meant to be done in a couple of minutes, not scheduled.
Where all this shows up
Everything here feeds Your Wellness. Habit completions and journaling frequency are inputs to the Wellness Intelligence and Onward Balance Index cards, which is how a month of consistent habits turns into a visible trend rather than a pile of checkmarks.
Common questions
What happens to my streak if I miss a day?
The current streak resets, but your history doesn't go anywhere — the 365-day heatmap keeps the full picture, which is the more honest view of a habit anyway.
Can I track habits weekly instead of daily?
Habits are tracked per day. For something genuinely weekly, a recurring task is usually the better fit.
Are gratitude and journal entries private?
Yes. Both are visible only to you and are never included in Team Health at any sharing level.
Does Onward enforce my boundaries?
No. Boundaries are a record of your intent, not a technical control. Onward doesn't mute notifications, restrict sign-in, or block work outside your stated hours.
Can I delete a habit without losing its history?
Deleting a habit removes it and its tracking. If you're only pausing, leaving it unchecked is safer — the heatmap will simply show the gap.