# Settings: where each thing is changed.

Source: https://www.onsecondbrain.com/guide/settings  
Language: en  
Spanish version: https://www.onsecondbrain.com/guide/settings.es.md

---

People almost always open Settings for the same reason: to make the app comfortable to look at. This page starts there — appearance, the three darks, interface size, language, the phone's colour background and notifications — and then walks tab by tab through the two settings screens: yours, which follows you across every space, and the workspace's. For each thing it says whether it is stored in your account or on the device you are using.

## Appearance and notifications

### Three levels, three places

Before hunting for an option, it helps to know which level it belongs to. Almost every "it did not save" question turns out to be a per-device preference.

- **This device** — The theme — light, dark or automatic —, interface size, the phone's colour background and local caches. They do not travel: you can keep the app dark and small on the big monitor, and light on the phone.
- **Your account** — Your name, language, notifications, plan, storage, your MCP connections and your WhatsApp and Telegram chats. They follow you across every workspace.
- **The workspace** — The name, recap types, connected calendars, the shape of the digest and the integrations. They apply to everything you do inside that space.

Both screens open from the top right: the circle with your initials → Account settings and the workspace name → Edit workspace.

### How the app looks

All of this lives in Account settings → Profile, applies instantly, and there is nothing to save. The theme can also be switched in one tap from the circle's menu, under Theme.

- **Light, Dark or Auto** — Auto follows the system: it goes dark when your computer goes dark. It is stored on this device: the phone has its own.
- **Three different darks** — With Dark or Auto on, Dark variant appears: Blue — deep blue, the default —, Gray — neutral grey — and Black — near-pure black, the one that draws least on OLED screens. It changes the whole background of the app, not an accent.
- **Interface size** — A five-step slider that scales the whole app, not just the text: margins, rows and icons grow with it. It is also stored on this device.
- **Language** — Spanish or English. It goes to your account, not to the device: changing it on the phone changes the web too. The app reloads itself when you apply it.

![The daily screen cut diagonally: the left half in the light theme and the right half in dark](https://www.onsecondbrain.com/screens/guide/tema-claro-oscuro.png)

_The same screen with Light and with Dark._

![The same tab with the dark theme on and the three variants visible](https://www.onsecondbrain.com/screens/guide/settings-dark.png)

_The Profile tab with Dark and the Blue variant._

### On the phone, and the colour background

The phone app has its own settings under More → Settings, and they are not a subset of the desktop ones: the language is your account's, the appearance belongs to each phone, and they add the ones that only make sense on a phone.

- **Colour background** — A soft gradient with colour blooms drifting very slowly behind everything. It ships on and a switch turns it off, leaving the background flat. It sits behind the five tabs; detail screens are always flat.
- **Language and appearance** — The language is your account's. Appearance is System / Light / Dark, with no dark variants and no interface size, and it stays on this phone.
- **Pomodoro** — The focus and break lengths and the break check-in are the same as on the computer. Alarm when it ends — ringing and vibrating until you stop it — belongs to each phone.
- **Face ID on open** — Shows up only if the phone has biometrics set up, and it belongs to the user who turned it on: on the same phone, another account sees it off.

Further down come Your voice, Your energy, Chats — linking WhatsApp and Telegram —, Alerts and Delete account, the same as on the computer. Workspace settings — the name, weekends and the digest by email — have their own button at the very top of More, next to the one for switching workspace; the rest is set up on the computer.

![The same daily screen on the phone, one with the colour background on and the other with a flat background](https://www.onsecondbrain.com/screens/guide/phone-fondo-color.png)
![The same daily screen on the phone, one with the colour background on and the other with a flat background](https://www.onsecondbrain.com/screens/guide/phone-fondo-plano.png)

_The colour background on — how it ships — and off._

![The iPhone app settings: language, appearance and the colour background](https://www.onsecondbrain.com/screens/guide/phone-settings.png)

_The iPhone settings._

### Notifications

You choose them by type, not by channel: you say what you want to hear about and the notice goes out whichever way can reach you — the app notification if you have it installed, chat if not, and email last. Picking the channel by hand is not a decision worth making anyone take; wanting a reminder to ring while not hearing about every shared document is.

| Notification | When it arrives |
| --- | --- |
| Reminders | The time came for something you asked to be reminded of. |
| Recaps ready | An audio you forwarded finished being summarized. |
| New tasks | Someone assigned you a task. |
| Shared | Someone shared a document, a recap or a person with you. |
| Calendar events | Ten minutes before every timed event, or whatever you pick; each event can ask for something else from its own card. |
| What needs your attention | Once a day, at the time you choose — and on Saturday and Sunday too, if you want —: overdue or stalled tasks, promises that have not moved and recaps you took nothing from. Tapping it opens the full detail. |
| … before a meeting | What is stalled for that organization or project travels inside the event notice, not in a separate one. |
| «You» report by email · Hobby | Every 7, 15 or 30 days: what you are like, what you improved and what to work on, drawn from your meetings. It needs your voice registered. See Secondbrain Me. |

They all ship on except the «You» report, and the preference belongs to your account: turning one off on the phone turns it off everywhere.

> **Where they are — which is not the same place on both**
>
> On the phone, under More → Settings → Alerts. On the computer, under Account settings → Notifications; in the desktop app that tab adds Notify me when a call starts, which applies to that computer only.
>
> And there is one thing no switch here can do: if you said no to the system notification permission, nothing on this screen brings it back. That gets turned on in the phone, computer or browser settings.

## Tab by tab

### Your account

| Tab | What is inside |
| --- | --- |
| Profile | First and last name, appearance, interface size and language — above, in How the app looks —, the Pomodoro's check-in during the break and, in the desktop app, the focus and break lengths. Also Your voice: the fingerprint your recaps use to mark what you say — see My voice — and below it Your energy: when you perform best and what your day looks like, the same workday the planner uses. Both feed Secondbrain Me. |
| Plan | Which plan you are on and what it costs, your usage this month against each cap — AI actions, digests, messages, reminders, transcription hours, storage and workspaces —, the feature-by-feature detail and the button to change it. If you bought it on the iPhone, it is managed from there. |
| Storage | How much you use against your plan limit, broken down by workspace and by file type — images, documents, video, audio —, and the largest files, so you can delete them right there. It is the total across all your workspaces, not the one you are looking at. |
| MCP | You pick the tool — Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude Code, Cursor, n8n or another — and it tells you how to connect it: by signing in, or with a token generated right there. Below, Your connections: what you connected and your tokens, to disconnect, regenerate or revoke. See MCP and AI clients. |
| Messaging | Link WhatsApp and Telegram with the link — or the eight-character code — the bot replies with, choose which workspace each one writes to and which ones it can look into, and the list of commands. See WhatsApp and Telegram. |
| Notifications | The notifications, one by one. On the iPad it replaces Messaging: chats are linked from the web. |
| Security | Analytics cookies, two-step verification, exporting all your data as a ZIP and deleting the account. See Account security. |
| Advanced | Clear the browser cache and empty the screenshot cache from screen comprehension — it clears itself after 7 days or past 500 MB. |

![The Account settings modal, on the Profile tab](https://www.onsecondbrain.com/screens/guide/settings-account.png)

_The Profile tab, in the light theme._

![The voice section, at the bottom of the Profile tab](https://www.onsecondbrain.com/screens/guide/mi-voz-perfil.png)

_Your voice, at the bottom of Profile. It is recorded in a separate modal, and can be re-recorded or deleted whenever you want._

### The workspace

These options apply to everything you do inside that workspace, and they do not travel to the others.

| Tab | What is inside |
| --- | --- |
| General | The name, what you use it for (Work, Personal or Study — which decides the summary styles offered when generating a recap), hide weekends from the list of days and close the day automatically, which ships on: past days left open close by themselves once midnight passes with the app open, or the next time you open it. This is also where the workspace is deleted. |
| Recaps & Docs | The recap types — the setup assistant proposes them based on what you do, and you edit, add and delete them here —, your summary templates — the structure each recap is written in — and your document generation templates, each with its own preloaded instruction. |
| Calendar | Connect Google, Microsoft or iCloud to read and write events — and tick which calendars of each account belong to this workspace —, or add one by iCal URL, which comes in read-only. Below, the iCal subscription: the address for seeing your dated tasks from another calendar. See Calendar and planning. |
| Digest | The digest structure — Narrative, Executive, By project, or up to two of your own —, the extra instructions that shift its focus and, on Pro, automatic delivery by email with its hour and its type per day. See The digest. |
| Integrations | ClickUp and Jira, with two-way task sync, and the way in to the Web Clipper. |
| Advanced | Clear the cache, purge unused tags — the Atlas ones that appear in no daily note; it cannot be undone — and Auto-merge duplicates, which joins tags with the same name or matching another one's alias, keeping the one with more occurrences. |

![The Edit Workspace modal, on the Digest tab](https://www.onsecondbrain.com/screens/guide/settings-workspace.png)

_The Digest tab of Edit workspace._

### Your workspaces

A workspace is an independent working space: its own content, its own Atlas, its own digest. You switch between them and create them from the workspace name at the top right — My Workspaces and New workspace —; on the phone, from More.

- How many you get is set by your plan: one on the free plan, two on Hobby, ten on Pro and twenty-five on Unlimited.
- A new one is set up with an assistant that proposes the initial configuration based on how you work.
- A workspace is never shared whole: what you share you pick piece by piece — a document, a recap, a board —, with one person or with a team. See Secondbrain Teams.

> **One personal, one for work**
>
> Having two workspaces is how personal life and work stop sharing an Atlas and a digest: each one has its own.

### Integrations

All of them are connected from one of the two screens, all optional, and disconnectable whenever you want. The full list — calendars, ClickUp, Jira, WhatsApp and Telegram, AI clients, browsers — lives on its own page.

- [Integrations](https://www.onsecondbrain.com/guide/integrations) — Calendars, ClickUp, Jira, WhatsApp and Telegram, AI clients and browsers.
- [Web and desktop app](https://www.onsecondbrain.com/guide/web) — The full workspace, in your browser or on your desktop.
- [The daily note](https://www.onsecondbrain.com/guide/dailynotes) — Bullets, inheritance, predictive typing and dates: how to write it.