To Ms Society

Working With To Ms Society: A Practical Walkthrough

To Ms Society is a social accountability and community management platform that helps individuals and teams track habits, set shared goals, and maintain streaks across group activities. It operates as both a mobile app and a web dashboard, and its core value proposition centers on making personal commitment visible to a small network of real people rather than to anonymous leaderboards. I found this out the hard way after trying to set up a team goal structure for a remote work project. The interface assumes you already understand how to link external calendars and notification providers before the onboarding flow even asks you to confirm your email. That said, the actual setup process is straightforward once you push through the initial friction.

Downloading and Installing To Ms Society

The platform is available through the Apple App Store, Google Play Store, and directly from their website at tomsociety.com. The web version requires no installation and includes every feature present in the mobile apps. I prefer the web interface for administrative tasks like managing multiple groups and exporting data, while the mobile app handles daily check-ins and push notifications. If you run into download issues on Android, note that the Play Store listing sometimes shows a different package name depending on your region. The app is listed under "To Ms Society" in most markets, but in certain European regions it appears as "TOMS Society." Both versions sync to the same backend, so it does not matter which one you install.

Setting Up Your First Account

Create an account using your email address. You will be prompted to choose between a Personal plan and a Team plan during registration. The Personal plan is free and supports up to three active goals with a single social circle. The Team plan starts at $8 per member per month and unlocks unlimited goals, sub-teams, and admin controls. During account setup, you must define your primary social circle. This is not optional. To Ms Society requires you to add at least two contacts before you can create your first tracked goal. You can add contacts by email invitation or by sharing a referral link. The system does not allow anonymous solo tracking, which is intentional by design and the main reason people either love this platform or quit within the first week.

Creating and Managing Goals

Once your account is active, navigate to the goals section and select "Create New Goal." You will define the goal type, frequency, duration, and the specific metric you are tracking. Common goal types include daily habits, weekly milestones, and project-based targets. Each goal has an associated check-in requirement that members of your circle can view and respond to. One thing beginners consistently miss is the difference between soft commitments and hard commitments. A soft commitment means your circle can see that you have not checked in, but there is no penalty attached. A hard commitment triggers automatic consequence actions that you configure in advance, such as a donation to a charity you dislike or a public notification sent to your entire circle. Setting hard commitments too aggressively is the fastest way to burn out your social circle and get members to leave your group.

Syncing External Tools

To Ms Society integrates with Google Calendar, Apple Health, Fitbit, and Strava. These integrations are configured under Settings > Connected Apps. Enable each integration individually and grant the necessary permissions. The data flow is primarily one-way, meaning activity from health and fitness apps feeds into your goal tracking, but To Ms Society does not write back to those services. I spent about forty-five minutes troubleshooting a Fitbit sync that refused to update my daily step counts. The issue turned out to be that Fitbit's API requires a secondary authorization step that is buried in the Fitbit developer portal, not in the To Ms Society settings screen. The workaround is to visit the Fitbit OAuth consent page directly through your browser while logged into both accounts, then return to To Ms Society and refresh the connection. This is documented nowhere in their help articles, which simply say "reconnect your Fitbit if sync fails."

Managing Groups and Circles

Groups are the organizational backbone of To Ms Society. A single account can manage multiple groups, each with its own goals, members, and communication channels. Group admins can set participation requirements, moderate check-ins, and export group analytics. Non-admin members can only see goals and activities within the groups they have been invited to join. The notification system deserves specific attention. By default, To Ms Society sends check-in reminders, circle activity updates, and milestone congratulations via push notification and email. This defaults to an aggressive configuration that sends multiple notifications per day per goal. I reduced mine to a single daily digest by going into Notification Preferences and selecting "Summary Mode," which consolidates all updates into one email delivered at a chosen time. Without this adjustment, notification fatigue is nearly guaranteed.

Data Export and Privacy

To Ms Society allows data export in CSV format under Account Settings > Data Management. The export includes all goal history, check-in records, and group membership data. Personal information such as email addresses and contact names is included in the export but redacted in shared group views, which is a reasonable privacy boundary. However, the platform does not offer end-to-end encryption for your goal content, and all data is stored on their servers in standard encrypted form at rest. If data portability is a priority for you, export your data before committing long-term. I learned this after a partner left a shared group and expected their historical check-in data to disappear. It did not disappear, but it was no longer accessible to them, and recovering it required a support ticket that took six business days to resolve.

Limitations and When to Look Elsewhere

To Ms Society works well for small groups practicing habit tracking with social accountability. It breaks down noticeably in several scenarios. The platform lacks native integration with Slack, Discord, or Microsoft Teams, which makes it difficult to incorporate into existing workplace communication flows. There is no API available for custom integrations, so if your organization relies on automated workflows, you will need to build manual processes or use a third-party automation tool. The free plan's three-goal limit is strict and cannot be bypassed by deleting old goals to make room for new ones without losing historical data. The deletion process is also not reversible. If you manage more than three concurrent objectives, the Team plan is effectively mandatory, and the per-member pricing scales quickly with group size. For users who need advanced analytics, custom reporting, or deeper third-party integrations, Habitica or the Scheduling module in Notion may serve better. Habitica offers a gamified approach with more robust achievement tracking, while Notion provides flexible database structures that can replicate To Ms Society's goal tracking with significantly more customization. To Ms Society's advantage is its focus on social visibility rather than gamification or pure data organization, so the trade-off depends on whether accountability through social pressure is actually the mechanism that keeps you consistent.