Stage-Aware Tasks and Reminders That Re-Derive Themselves | Linea

The short answer

Pregnancy and newborn checklists usually encode a single number — "week 28", "six months" — and print the items that belong to it, which makes them right on exactly one day and quietly wrong every day after. Linea derives its plan from where you actually are: the stage your dates put you in, your gestational week or your baby's age in months, and the medical schedule for your region. It shows what is current, what is coming next, and why each one matters — and you can put a time on any item and get a single reminder 24 hours before it. Because it runs on one timeline from planning to age three, that plan keeps re-deriving itself through pregnancy, birth, postpartum recovery and toddlerhood instead of restarting at each seam. Read what it covers before deciding on the product page.

Why the same checklist stops working after a few weeks

Most "what to do this week" lists fail arithmetically rather than by inattention. The number inside them moves every day; the list does not. At week 29 you are still looking at a sheet built for week 22, carrying three items that closed a month ago and missing the one that opened last Tuesday.

What is left is maintenance work. Delete what no longer applies, add what just opened, and work out which of the twenty-odd entries in a generic newborn checklist are actually load-bearing this week — a bad use of a bad moment at 3am with a newborn. The deeper reason people give these lists up is that they make you the scheduler: someone else decided the order, you execute it and then maintain it. This inverts it: the list is a function of where you are, so it re-derives when you move. You are still free to disagree with any item, but you are not curating the list either.

How the list is actually built

Three inputs, and only three.

The stage is derived, never stored. It keeps your last menstrual period, your due date, your baby's birth date, and the outcome — ongoing, live birth, or loss — then computes the stage from those every time it loads. There is no separate "current stage" field to drift. A stored stage would eventually disagree with the dates beside it: you would sit in the third trimester with a two-year-old's birth date. Here one owner computes it, so that bug has nowhere to land.

The number. During pregnancy it is your gestational week, taken from the last menstrual period or inferred backwards from the due date if that is all you entered, clamped to 0–42. After birth it is your baby's age in whole months from the birth date. The same resolver feeds the plan and the reading list, so the two cannot disagree about where you are.

The region. Linea reads your device's language-and-region setting: mainland China gets the national schedule, everywhere else gets the US one built on CDC, ACOG and AAP guidance. There is no in-app region switch on the plan — a real trade-off worth knowing before you rely on it.

When there is not enough data to place you, the plan shows an empty state and asks you to set up your journey. It does not guess a position — a checklist that quietly assumes week 12 because it has to render something is worse than one that admits it does not know yet.

What is in the list, and when

The windows are concrete and region-specific.

• Preconception — folic acid, and a preconception check-up.
• Pregnancy — NT scan in weeks 11–13; genetic screening 12–22; the anatomy scan at 20–24 in China and 18–22 in the US; glucose screening 24–28; Tdap at 27–36 in the US track; GBS at 35–37 in China and 36–37 in the US. Routine check-ups recur every four weeks from week 4 through week 40.
• Tasks with a deadline — a birth plan from week 28, the hospital bag across weeks 32–36 and packed by week 36, and the car seat installed across weeks 32–38.
• After birth — well-child visits at 1, 3, 6, 8, 12, 18 and 24 months in China, and 1, 2, 4, 6, 9, 12, 15, 18 and 24 in the US; immunisations at each region's own months; introducing solids from about six months.

The vaccine rows go further than a month label. Linea lists the actual shots behind each visit — at two months in the US, DTaP, Hib, PCV, IPV, RV and a HepB dose; in China at two months, IPV; at birth in China, HepB and BCG. It tells you plainly to confirm the exact set with your provider or local schedule, since a schedule is only as current as the version it was built from.

Three rules that decide what you see

Expired does not always mean gone. A screening or a check-up stays on the list after its window closes, marked done, because "did I have this?" is a question you will keep asking. A task that has simply expired — the car seat, the hospital bag — disappears instead, because a stale "install the car seat" is noise.

Sparse months are expanded into spans. Vaccines and well-child visits happen at discrete months, but a baby is seven months old for a whole month, not on a single day. Each point is widened into a span running until the next one, so nothing vanishes into the gap between six and eight months. The last point lingers out to three years.

One item leads. The plan highlights a single most important thing — the warning-level items first, then the routine ones — and that same item is the one the "why this matters" card explains. The week's count shows only items you can still act on, so a quiet week reads as a quiet week rather than four things you failed at.

What a reminder is, and what it is not

You set the time; Linea does the arithmetic. There is exactly one lead time — 24 hours before — hardcoded rather than configurable, so nothing surprising fires at the wrong hour.

Two behaviours are worth knowing because they are deliberate:

• No notification permission means no alert, but not a lost entry. The appointment is still saved, and the panel tells you so in those terms rather than pretending something is scheduled to remind you.
• Missed reminders are never backfilled. If a reminder time has passed, it is skipped rather than fired late — a notification about an appointment six hours ago is not reassurance.

The queue is reconciled so that what is pending always equals your unexpired, authorised appointments — on launch, and again after any change. It reminds you about an appointment you entered. It does not book anything with a clinic, and it does not notify you on its own that a window has opened; windows show up on the plan, and the reminder is the part you set.

The plan tells you why — then hands off

Every plan item with a matching article carries a "why this matters" card explaining it in place, and the card opens the full piece. Thirty-three articles across screenings, check-ups, red flags, nutrition, milestones, vaccines and tasks. The batch-generated rows — recurring check-ups, vaccine visits, well-child visits — have no one-to-one article, so they get a short parameterised explanation instead of pretending one exists.

Safety triage is kept deliberately separate from the plan, because it is a different kind of claim. The triage evaluates the last seven days of symptom entries against explicit thresholds: reduced fetal movement, leaking fluid, vision changes, breathlessness, one-sided leg pain and foul-smelling locha are flagged at any severity; bleeding, fever and wound inflammation from moderate upward; severe headache, persistent vomiting, swelling, abdominal pain, dizziness and low mood only when severe. Regular contractions count before 37 weeks and stop counting at term. When something trips a threshold, the card names the symptom and offers care guidance. Where symptoms are not logged — pregnancy and the first postpartum year only — it says so and makes no assessment at all. Nothing here diagnoses; it routes.

What Linea does differently

The differentiator is not that Linea reminds you about appointments — plenty of apps can do that. It is that the plan is a derived view rather than a stored list: stage computed from dates, windows from the schedule for your region, and completed-versus-expired decided per item type. The reminder sits on top of that as one 24-hour nudge you never configure, and the explanation sits next to it so the item is not just an instruction.

Honest limits. Region follows your device setting rather than where you gave birth, so check anything unusual with your own provider. Reminders only exist for appointments you entered by hand. And Linea positions itself as informational — it tells you when to contact a clinician and stops there, rather than touching anything that would cross into diagnosis.

Where that leaves you

If a static checklist you maintain yourself works for you, keep using one — there is nothing wrong with it. If what you want is a list that is correct today, re-derives itself next month, and puts the same single 24-hour nudge in front of you for a check-up instead of leaving you to manage thirty entries across two subjects by hand, that is the trade on offer. It works fully offline and keeps private records on device first, so none of this depends on trusting someone with your data. Read the full plan and privacy details before you decide.