Set Up Your Care Circle in 15 Minutes
This is a how-to, not an argument. If you have an account, you can finish in about fifteen minutes.
One piece of advice first. Do not try to model everything. The usual way this setup fails is that someone spends two hours building a complete care plan, never quite finishes, and gives up. A circle with three real tasks in it beats a perfect plan that only exists as a draft.
Create the elder's profile, about 3 minutes
Go to the elder setup page at /elder/setup.
Add name, birth date, care type and an emergency contact. This profile is what everything else attaches to, including tasks, alerts and health signals.
You can change all of it later, so do not stall on picking exactly the right care type.
Invite the circle, about 3 minutes
Go to /care-circles and send invites.
Add the people actually involved: siblings, a paid caregiver, a neighbor who checks in. Each person gets a role that controls what they can see and change.
A rule of thumb that saves arguments later. Invite anyone who would be upset to hear about a Critical alert late. That is usually a slightly larger group than the people doing daily coordination, and that is fine. Being able to see something and being responsible for it are different things.
Set notification rules before you need them, about 4 minutes
Go to /settings/notifications.
People skip this step, and it decides whether the system helps or turns into noise. You are choosing which channel each severity level uses.
A reasonable starting point:
| Severity | Channel |
|---|---|
| Critical | SMS, every guardian, any hour |
| Warning | Push notification |
| Informational | Email digest |
Then set quiet hours. Critical alerts break through them by design. Everything else waits until morning.
Do this now rather than later. Preference tuning done after a bad night of alerts tends to overcorrect, and people usually mute more than they meant to.
Add exactly three tasks, about 4 minutes
Open your circle and go to its tasks page.
Not the full care plan. Three things that are genuinely overdue or due this week: a prescription refill, an appointment to book, a wellness check.
Give each one an owner and a due date. Both matter, and the owner matters more. "Someone should call the pharmacy" is exactly the kind of coordination failure a task board exists to prevent, and unassigned tasks quietly recreate it inside the tool.
Come back in a week, about 1 minute
Open your circle's timeline page.
The timeline shows what happened: tasks completed, alerts raised, notes added. After a week, compare it against your memory of that week.
If they do not match, that tells you something. Usually it means something real is happening outside the system rather than that the system is wrong. Add it, and next week's timeline gets more accurate.
What finished looks like
A profile, the right people invited, notification rules you chose on purpose, and three assigned tasks with dates. That is a working circle.
Everything else builds up from there, and it works better once there is real history behind it than it would have as a guess on the first day.