Projects: big goals, small steps
Name a big goal, a trip, a launch, a room to sort out, and break it down into steps you can start today. Projects keep the tasks and habits for one outcome together, with progress you can see.
What you can do with Projects
- One page for one outcome. Give a project a status, areas, a start and a target date, a description, and the people working on it and accountable for it.
- Everything moving one goal forward. The tasks that serve the same pursuit sit together on the project's page, instead of scattered through your to-do list.
- Room to think the big idea through. Write the plan and the thinking behind it in the project's description. Start a project from an event, and the event's note or mind map stays one click away.
- Tasks and habits together. Add tasks and habits right from the project; they take its areas and people with them. Linked events show up too.
- Break it down. Name the goal, choose roughly how many steps (3, 5, 7 or 10), and AI proposes them. Edit, remove or add steps, and nothing becomes a task until you press Confirm. Or start blank, or from a shape: plan an event, plan a trip, launch something, get something set up, a personal goal, or sort out a tangle.
- Your projects at a glance. Group them by status or area, filter by area or status, and add a task to any project without opening it.
- Worth knowing: Projects are part of Xale Pro, with room for up to 500 of them.
Why I wanted to break down big goals
As I used Xale, I kept finding groups of tasks tied together by a larger pursuit: a trip, a launch, a room to sort out. A big goal on its own is hard to start; broken into a few small steps, the first one is easy. A project gave those steps a shared place, with the people involved close by, so the app could hold not just the next action but the thing all those actions were moving forward.
Rachit, founder of Xale
The ideas behind Projects
A project is anything that takes more than one step
If it can't be done in one go, it deserves a name of its own, so the steps have something to belong to.
- Worth reading: David Allen, Getting Things Done (2001). Any outcome that needs more than one action is a project, and each one needs a clear next action.
- The usual way: a trip's twelve tasks scattered through a to-do list, none of them saying what they're for.
- In this release: tasks and habits grouped under the outcome they serve, with progress you can see.
Big goals get done in small steps
A goal feels possible once it's broken into steps you could start today.
- Worth reading: Stephen R. Covey, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People (1989). Begin with the end in mind, then work back to what you'll do this week.
- The usual way: a big goal written at the top of a page, and no idea where to start.
- In this release: Break it down turns a goal into proposed steps you edit before anything is created.
Further reading
- Edwin A. Locke and Gary P. Latham, "Building a practically useful theory of goal setting and task motivation: A 35-year odyssey", American Psychologist (2002). Specific, challenging goals lead to better results than vague ones. doi:10.1037/0003-066X.57.9.705
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