Practical tips, best practices, and insider tricks from the people who built it. Whether you're just getting started or looking to go deeper, this guide will help.
The first few minutes in MyCitadel set the foundation for everything. Here is how to spend them well.
Don't try to add everyone at once. Start with the five people whose relationships you most want to invest in — your spouse or partner, your kids, a close friend, a parent, a sibling. Add their birthday, a few notes, and any attributes you know. Getting five people set up well is more valuable than fifty people set up poorly.
You can always add more people later. The Oracle becomes noticeably more useful once it has a few well-filled profiles to work with.
Go to the Me page and fill in your basics: your birthday, your occupation, your hometown, your love language. The Oracle uses this to understand who you are before you've said a word. A five-minute Me profile setup makes every Oracle conversation significantly better.
Go to Tracking and turn on the 3-4 metrics that matter most to you — mood, sleep, and energy are a good starting trio for most people. Don't try to track everything. Tracking three things consistently is far more valuable than tracking twenty things inconsistently. You can always add more later.
The relationships section is the heart of MyCitadel. Here is how to use it in a way that actually strengthens your connections, not just documents them.
The most valuable interactions to log are the ones right after they happen — a meaningful conversation, a dinner, a phone call where something important was shared. Log it the same day if you can, while the details are still vivid. Even a short note captures something you would otherwise forget in a week.
The Notes field on a contact is included in Oracle context every time you mention that person. Use it for the most important standing facts: "Going through a divorce right now," "Very sensitive about his weight," "Lost her mom last year, still grieving," "Responds best to direct communication." These are the things you don't want the Oracle to miss.
Beyond the standard fields, you can add custom attributes to any contact. Some of the most useful ones: favorite restaurant, favorite sports team, current hobby, shoe size, book they're reading, gift ideas you've thought of. When the Oracle helps you think through a gift or a meaningful gesture, it will reference these.
Facts go in attributes. Memories are for the stories — the time your son said something that caught you off guard, the trip you took with your spouse, the moment a friendship became real. These are the things that make the Oracle's advice feel personal rather than generic. When you tell the Oracle "I want to do something meaningful for her," it will draw on these memories.
The health scoring system is meant to be a helpful signal, not a report card. A contact showing "Neglected" doesn't mean you're a bad friend — it just means MyCitadel hasn't seen an interaction logged recently. Some relationships are meant to be less frequent. Use the scores as a gentle nudge, not a source of guilt.
Make it a monthly habit to open the Dates page and scan the upcoming 30 days. It takes two minutes and means you will never be caught off guard by a birthday or anniversary. The upcoming strip at the top shows events in the next 60 days, so you have plenty of lead time to plan something meaningful.
The Oracle gets dramatically better the more data you have in MyCitadel. Here is how to use it in a way that gets the most out of every conversation.
The more specific your question, the more useful the Oracle's response. Vague questions get generic answers. Specific questions get specific answers.
Some of the most valuable Oracle conversations are the ones where you're not looking for a specific answer — you're just thinking out loud about something that's been weighing on you. The Oracle is a good listener and will help you articulate what you're actually feeling, identify what's really at stake, and find your own clarity.
Before a difficult conversation, a big family decision, or even a first date with an idea you want to run by someone — open Deep Dive for the relevant person. The Oracle will pull everything it knows and give you a complete picture. Then ask it to help you prepare. "I'm about to have a hard conversation with my dad about his health. Help me think through how to approach it given our relationship history."
The Oracle learns from everything you share. When something important happens — a job change, a health diagnosis, a relationship shift — tell the Oracle. It will save the relevant facts to your profile and use them in future conversations. Think of it as keeping a trusted advisor up to date on your life.
The Oracle keeps track of your conversation history, but each conversation works best when it has a clear focus. Start a new conversation when you switch from talking about your marriage to talking about a work goal. This keeps the context clean and prevents the Oracle from mixing up threads.
The Oracle gives thoughtful, context-aware guidance — but it's still an AI working from the information you've provided. For anything that involves your health, mental wellbeing, legal situation, or finances, use the Oracle to think through your situation, but bring a qualified professional into decisions that really matter. The Oracle is a great first conversation partner, not a replacement for expert advice.
Tracking works when it becomes a habit. Here is how to make it stick.
The most common mistake people make with life tracking is enabling too many metrics at once. You end up overwhelmed, miss a day, feel like you've failed, and give up. Pick two or three metrics that genuinely reflect how you want to feel in your life and start there. You can always add more once logging feels effortless.
The quick-log strip at the top of the dashboard shows all your active metrics. You don't need to navigate to the tracking page every day. Just open the dashboard, glance at the strip, and tap the metrics you need to log. It takes under a minute when it's built into your existing routine.
The easiest way to build a logging habit is to attach it to something you already do every day — morning coffee, brushing your teeth at night, or a specific alarm. Don't rely on remembering to do it. The daily question widget on the dashboard will also surface your unlogged metrics as gentle reminders.
Logging data is only half the value. The other half is understanding what it means. After a few weeks of consistent tracking, ask the Oracle questions like "What patterns do you notice in my mood and energy over the past few weeks?" or "Do my stress levels seem connected to anything in my life right now?" The Oracle can connect dots across your tracking, your goals, and your relationships in ways that raw numbers can't.
Goals in MyCitadel are designed to be lived with, not filed away. Here is how to make them work.
The best goals describe what you want to be true, not what you want to do. "Run three times a week" is an activity. "Feel energetic and strong by summer" is an outcome. Outcomes stay motivating even when the specific plan needs to change. Activities become rigid.
A goal without milestones is just a wish. As soon as you create a goal, add the first three concrete steps that would move you toward it. They don't need to be perfect — you can adjust them as you go. The act of breaking a goal down is where clarity comes from.
Tell the Oracle about a goal you're struggling with. Ask it "why do you think I keep not making progress on this goal?" It will look at your tracking data, your other goals, and your life context and often surface something you hadn't consciously noticed — like the fact that your stress levels spike every week around the time you planned to work on it.
The question engine is one of the most underused features in MyCitadel. Here is how to get real value from it.
The dashboard shows one spotlight question every day. It takes 10-30 seconds to answer and writes data directly to your account — no AI tokens, no friction. Over a few weeks, answering the daily question builds a remarkably rich picture of your life and your relationships without you ever sitting down to "fill in your profile."
Once a week or once a month, open the full Questions page and answer 10-15 questions in one sitting. The queue is grouped by category — People, Health, Goals, About Me. Pick the category that feels most incomplete and work through it. Twenty minutes of answering questions adds more useful context than hours of manually filling out forms.
Questions are generated based on real gaps in your data. If you see a question about someone's birthday, it's because that birthday is actually missing. If you see a question about your love language, it's because the Oracle doesn't know it yet. Every question you answer is directly making future Oracle conversations better.
MyCitadel works best when it becomes a natural part of your rhythm, not another app you open once a week and feel guilty about.
The most effective MyCitadel users have a simple daily routine:
That's it. Five minutes a day builds a living record of your life that becomes genuinely valuable over months and years.
Once a week, open a new Oracle conversation and ask: "Give me a quick overview of how my week looked — my relationships, my health tracking, and my goal progress." The Oracle will synthesize everything from the past week and often notice things you missed. This weekly review habit is where the real compounding value of MyCitadel shows up.
MyCitadel works in any mobile browser. The best time to log a meaningful conversation or interaction is right after it happens — in the car before you drive home, or while you're still thinking about it. Open mycitadel.ai in Safari or Chrome on your phone, go to the person's profile, and add a quick interaction note. It takes two minutes and captures something that would otherwise be forgotten.
Once you've got the basics down, these tips will help you get more from the system.
When logging a memory about a contact, you can mark it as private. Private memories are stored in your account but are never included in Oracle context — they are for your eyes only. Use this for things you want to remember but would not want surfaced in a conversation: sensitive health information, something told to you in confidence, or your honest private thoughts about a difficult relationship.
Whenever you notice something a person in your life would love — a book, a restaurant they mentioned, an experience they've been wanting — add it as a contact attribute with the key "gift_ideas". By the time a birthday or holiday comes around, you'll have a personal library of ideas for every important person in your life, all sourced from real things they've actually said or hinted at.
The Oracle responds well to being given a specific frame. Instead of asking a general question, tell it how you want it to engage:
Framing the Oracle's role shapes the quality and angle of its response significantly.
If you're using MyCitadel's blog for SEO and content marketing, build depth in a few specific categories rather than posting broadly. Google rewards sites with topical authority — many posts on a narrow topic outperform a few posts on many topics. Pick two or three content themes that match your ideal user's search intent and go deep on them.
You do not need to log every interaction. You do not need to answer every question. You do not need to track every metric. The people who get the most from MyCitadel are not the ones who use it perfectly — they are the ones who use it consistently. A little bit, most days, over a long time, compounds into something genuinely meaningful.
Start simple. Stay consistent. Let the system grow with you.
Start with the 10-minute setup and see how it feels.
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