Goal settings
The goal detail opens with a double-click on the node (the pencil on a touch screen). It holds everything a goal carries — this page goes through the fields in depth; the quick summary table lives on the map overview.
Status
To do → In progress → Done. Click to cycle it — in the map, in the goal detail or in the task table; it is the same value everywhere. The status colors are deliberately the same in every skin: red for overdue, amber for in progress, green for done. A goal with the Wait for children switch can also hold itself in a waiting state until every goal underneath it is done — see waiting and blocking.
Deadline
Optional. A plan is not a deadline: you can plan the tasks under a goal for today or tomorrow without committing the goal to a date — and the other way round, a goal's deadline forces nobody to work on it today. How plans and deadlines (don't) relate is covered on Tasks and My day. Past its deadline, the goal lights up red in the map.
Responsible person and performer
Two different fields, worth keeping apart:
- Responsible person — who answers for the step and who gets the notifications (such as "Goal is ready" when the goal is unblocked). Assigning someone who has no access to the map offers to share it with them right away.
- Who performs it — a person, or an automation or agent — see Automations and agents. Even when a machine performs the step, the responsible person stays human: an automation has nobody to chase and nobody to answer to.
Color and icon
Preset colors or a custom one; the icon shows in the map and in the task table. Color and icon are purely visual — they have no effect on statuses, progress or notifications.
Description, comments and attachments
Longer text, discussion and files or links pinned to the goal. A Gmail link gets an envelope icon, a Google Drive/Docs link the triangle — and without a custom name a readable label instead of a truncated URL.
Tasks on a goal
A task always belongs to a specific goal. Picking a goal is mandatory in the task dialog — a task cannot be created without one. And the apex accepts no tasks: the apex is fulfilled by its goals getting done, not by a work list of its own. When a piece of work "fits nowhere", that is a signal a goal is missing from the map — create it and hang the task on it.
There is therefore no "detach task from goal": a task can only be moved to another goal. Nothing ever floats loose, and the badge on a node always shows all the work of that goal.
Next
- Tasks and My day — breaking goals into concrete work
- The canvas — layout, search and the other tools
- The map and goals — the overview of the whole map