Console

The Console is one of the most important components of Routine, giving you instant access to key productivity information, task capture, natural language commands, and the AI assistant — from anywhere on your desktop, within a fraction of a second.

In other words, whenever you interact with Routine through text instead of clicking, the Console is involved. It is present throughout the app to perform actions like creating tasks, scheduling events, searching, and more.

🤔 Why?

As a busy professional, your day often feels like constantly switching between apps just to answer basic questions:

• When is my next meeting?

• Where is the link to join the call?

• Do I have time for a coffee, or am I already late?

• I have a free slot — what are my tasks for today?

We built the Console because those few seconds of context switching add up and derail your momentum. Everything you need should be one keystroke away, no matter what you're working on.

🙉 Usage

Open the Console from anywhere on your desktop using CTRL+SPACE (or CMD+SPACE on macOS) — whether you're in a Zoom call, writing a document, or answering emails.

When you're done, hit ESC or click anywhere outside the Console to close it.

💡 You can change the hotkey to any keyboard combination of your choice in ⚙️ Settings.

📢 Hide without losing your work

If you've started typing in the Console but need to quickly check something, you don't have to close it and lose what you've written.

• Open the Console (CTRL+SPACE) and start typing

• Hit CTRL+SPACE again to hide it temporarily

• Re-open it with CTRL+SPACE — your text is still there 🎉

📋 Widgets

The Console surfaces key productivity information through widgets.

Tasks

The left widget lists the tasks you've scheduled for today. You can:

• Click to mark a task as complete

• Open a task for more details

• Reschedule or postpone directly from the widget

Time

On the right-hand side, time widgets keep you aware of your schedule:

• Pause widgets — show how much time you have before your next event, so you know exactly how long you can focus

• Event widgets — show everything you need about upcoming events: join a conference call, open the event to take notes, check attendees, and more

📝 Capture

The Console is the fastest way to capture anything — tasks, ideas, meeting notes — without leaving what you're working on.

Type naturally and hit Enter to save to your Inbox. Use natural language for dates, times, and context:

• "Call Sarah tomorrow at 3pm" → creates a scheduled task

• "Team meeting Friday at 10am for 1 hour" → creates a calendar event

• "Buy coffee" → saves to Inbox for later processing

🗝️ Natural language keywords

The Console understands the following keywords to set properties on tasks and events:

• on followed by a date

• at followed by a time

• for followed by a duration

• with followed by an email address

• every followed by a frequency

• starting followed by a date

• until followed by a date

• this followed by a keyword such as week, month, year, Monday, etc.

• next followed by a keyword such as week, month, year, Monday, etc.

Examples:

• "Get a haircut on Monday"

• "Submit tax report on September 22nd"

• "Prepare email draft on Monday at 2pm for 3h"

• "Clean office at 3pm for 1h30" (date defaults to today)

• "Sign contract tomorrow morning"

• "Check metrics every workday"

• "Call parents every Sunday starting next month"

• "Schedule call with Henry every quarter until 2025"

💡 A default duration of 30 minutes is assumed when looking for the first available time slot.

🎭 Supported formats

Date

• Day: Monday, Friday, etc.

• Month: September (converts to the 1st of that month)

• Year: 2025, 2026, etc.

• Full date: December 14th, the 12th of February, etc.

Time

• AM/PM: 2pm, 10:30am, etc.

• 24h: 13:00, 19:45, etc.

Duration

• Minutes: 30m, 30min, etc.

• Hours: 1h, 2h15, 1h30min, etc.

Frequency

• Day of the week: Monday, Friday, etc.

• Period: day, week, month, quarter, year

• Other: workweek

👾 Special words

Some words are recognized automatically without needing a keyword:

• today

• tomorrow, tmr

Default time ranges are also recognized:

• morning

• afternoon

• evening

🤔 Completion

The Console includes a powerful completion mechanism that suggests the most likely next input, saving you time and keystrokes.

• Use ↑ ↓ arrows to navigate suggestions

• Press TAB to complete and continue refining

• Press ENTER to validate the suggestion and add a space to continue typing

💡 There is a subtle difference between TAB and ENTER when selecting suggestions. If suggestions include both "house" and "household", pressing TAB on "house" keeps "household" as a further option, while pressing ENTER validates "house" immediately.

🙅 Escaping keywords

If you need to type a word that the Console would normally interpret as a keyword (e.g. "on", "every", "tomorrow"), press ESC when the suggestion appears and the Console will treat it as plain text.

👉 Redirection

When capturing a task or note, you can specify where it should be saved using the > character followed by the name of a parent object or calendar.

Use / as a separator to place the object under a specific heading within a page:

• "Meeting notes > Projects / Q3 Planning" → saves under the Q3 Planning heading inside the Projects page

🤖 AI Assistant

The Console also gives you direct access to the AI assistant through chat or voice.

From the Console you can:

• Ask questions about your schedule ("Do I have any conflicts on Thursday?")

• Delegate actions ("Cancel my 2pm meeting and notify the participants")

• Create and manage objects using natural language

• Long press the microphone button on mobile to use voice capture

The AI assistant understands the full context of your workspace and can act across your tasks, calendar, and integrations from a single instruction.

🖥️ Menu Bar Widget

If you want productivity information always visible without opening the Console, the Menu Bar Widget keeps your next event and daily tasks accessible from your system menu bar at all times.

See Menu Bar Widget for setup instructions.

📱 Note: The Routine mobile app does not provide the same natural language capabilities as the desktop Console. On mobile, voice capture and the AI assistant are the recommended ways to interact quickly.