# The daily rhythm

> An optional plan for the day. Set one and the log screen shows what is coming next and ticks things off as you log them.

Last updated 18 August 2026

A daily rhythm is the day you mean to have: a list of feeds and sleeps at rough times. Set one and the log screen shows what is coming next and ticks things off as you log them.

It is **entirely optional**. Plenty of families never set one, and baybay works exactly the same without it.

## What it gives you

![Today's plan on the log screen: 3 of 8 done, and an Up next card reading Afternoon feed at 2:00 PM, in 41 minutes.](https://baybay.baby/assets/img/docs/plan-on-log.png?v=6a84bb3b)
*This appears on the log screen once a rhythm is set.*

One block at the top of the log screen: what is coming next and how long until it, and how much of the day is done. That is the whole of it — there are no reminders, no notifications and no nagging if you drift.

## Setting one up

1. Open **Settings** and tap **Choose one** under **Daily rhythm**. The **Set a daily rhythm** link on the log screen goes to the same place.
2. Pick the template closest to your baby’s age. Each one says what it is and shows the day it lays out.
3. Set **Wakes at** to the hour your baby actually wakes. The whole day shifts with it, so you are not retyping fourteen times.
4. Tap **Use this day**. That is it — it is live immediately.

![A template card: Newborn, 0 to 3 months, a feed about every three hours and a sleep after every wake, six feeds and five sleeps, the times it lays out, a Wakes at time picker, and a Use this day button.](https://baybay.baby/assets/img/docs/schedule-templates.png?v=6a84bb3b)
*One of the six templates. The times move as you change the wake hour.*

## The templates, by age

Six of them, from **Newborn** at 0–3 months through to **One nap** at 14 months and up, with Five, Four, Three and Two naps in between. Pick roughly and adjust later — none of them is a rule, and a baby who has never read one is normal.

> **Worth knowing**
>
> A template is **copied into your household**, not followed from a distance. Once you have used one it is yours, and improving the template later never rewrites a schedule you have already adjusted.

## Changing it

Tap **Edit** on the rhythm and every row is what, when, and what to call it. Change a time, rename a row, add one, or delete one with the × beside it. Times sort themselves out when you save, and anything you leave unnamed gets called something sensible like Feed 3.

There is also **Or build your own** — an empty day you fill in from scratch, if none of the templates is close.

## More than one, and more than one child

- **Each child has their own.** With twins or a second baby, switch between them with the tabs at the top.
- **You can keep several and switch.** A weekday routine and a nursery day, say. Saved ones sit under **Also saved** with a **Use this** button; only one is active at a time.

## Bedtime is a sleep row

Schedules only say “asleep by about then”. Whether that turned into a nap or the night is the log’s business, so a bedtime row is ticked off by either. [Logging naps and nights](https://baybay.baby/docs/naps-and-nights.md).

## Times stay put across the clocks changing

A rhythm is wall-clock times, not fixed instants. The 1pm nap is still the 1pm nap the week the clocks go back, which is not true of everything that stores a time.

Once it is running, the next question is usually why a particular row did or did not get marked off. [How baybay decides](https://baybay.baby/docs/why-something-did-not-tick-off.md).

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From [How to use baybay](https://baybay.baby/docs.md). baybay — Feed and sleep tracking for the first year, logged in two taps. Hosted for $7 a month, or self-hosted free on PHP and SQLite with no Docker and no build step. Everything one family logs lives in a single SQLite file they can export or delete.

Canonical: https://baybay.baby/docs/the-daily-rhythm