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.
There are about two hundred icons, grouped into categories. The search line at the top takes English and Czech alike and ignores accents. The ones you used most recently stay at the top under Favourites, and if none of them fits, the Custom character field takes any emoji from your keyboard. Favourites live in your browser, so on another computer you start fresh.
Description, comments and attachments
The Attachments and Tasks & comments categories in the left menu show a count, so a comment you can already see on the goal card is not something you have to hunt for. An empty category carries no badge.
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.
Formatting the description
A toolbar above the field offers bold, italic, strikethrough, two heading levels, bulleted and numbered lists, and links. Ctrl+B and Ctrl+I work. The Preview switch shows how the text will read. This is for when the description is not just a label for the step but the write-up of a whole procedure.
A named link instead of a long address
The link button offers this goal's attachments: pick one and it goes into the text named the way the attachment is named. The description then reads "records" instead of a Google Sheets address spanning the whole line. You can also type any address and name it yourself.
On the map card the description appears without formatting marks — there is room for a line or two and asterisks would look like a defect. For a link you see its name.
A task = a goal with an assignee or a deadline
In killBottleneck a task is not a special record: a task is a goal that has an assignee or a deadline. New work = a new goal (subgoal). Nothing hangs in the air — whatever belongs to no map is an idea in the stash. The map's apex completes through the goals below it.
Set the assignee and deadline in this dialog — that turns the goal into a task: it shows up in the assignee's My day and deadline notifications watch over it.
Recurrence
A goal can repeat — daily, weekly or monthly. When marked Done it returns to To do by itself and the deadline advances in the rhythm of the original one: every Monday stays a Monday, the 31st stays the 31st (last day in shorter months). Missed occurrences skip to the nearest future one.
Under the hood there is no special machinery: the switch manages an ordinary automation rule ("on Done → back to To do, advance the deadline") that you will also see in the map's Rules. Edit it there by hand and the switch honestly says so and leaves it alone. A recurring goal carries a 🔁 badge — and note that a map with one never reports "All done" (operations never finish).
History — who did what, and when
Under "Tasks & comments", just before Automation, the goal dialog has History: one row per event, with the date and the time, newest first. It answers the question nobody else can — "why did this goal slip by a week, and who decided that?"
It shows the goal being created and deleted, changes of status, deadline, owner and name, moves under a different parent, changes to the brief, icon, colour and performer, plus comments and attachments added and automation rules that fired. A rule shows up as a rule, not as the person who once wrote it.
A few things worth saying up front:
- Content is not copied here. For the brief and for comments you see that something changed (comments also get a short preview), not the full text. History is a record of movement, not a second copy of your data.
- Moving a card on the canvas is not recorded. Tidying the map would flood the log and bury the changes that matter.
- A deleted comment or attachment disappears from the history too. A deleted goal leaves a "Goal deleted" row; comments do not, yet.
- History reaches 400 days back. Older entries are cleaned up automatically.
- A publicly shared map does not expose its history. A public link shows the current state, not who changed what or what you deleted.
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