Experiments

Goal breakdown generatorA goal you cannot start
is not a goal yet.

The gap between a goal and a plan is one specific thing: a first action small enough that you could do it in the next hour without deciding anything else. Almost every abandoned goal was abandoned at that gap, not at the deadline — there was never a first move, only an intention, and an intention has nothing to start.

Free, no sign-up. Worked out in your browser, nothing sent anywhere, and the result imports into EvyOS.

Say what you will have at the end.

Everything is worked out in this page and saved in this browser only. Nothing is sent anywhere.

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✦ How to use it

Three things that make it work.

1
Say what exists at the end

In the past tense, as though describing it afterwards. Vagueness survives the future tense and dies in the past one.

2
Give it a real deadline

The checkpoint spacing comes from it, and a goal without one is a preference.

3
Do the first action today

It is written to be small enough. Doing it now is the whole difference between a plan and a document.

This takes the outcome and the time you have, and cuts it into checkpoints at real dates, with the first fortnight's actions spelled out. The checkpoint count comes from the horizon rather than a fixed number, because four milestones across three weeks is admin and four across two years is nothing.

The wording is yours. What this supplies is the shape: dated checkpoints, a first action, and a warning when the goal is still stated as a wish rather than a thing you can do.

✦ The limit

An answer is not a record.

This works something out and then forgets it. It cannot tell you whether the number moved, because it has no memory of the last time you ran it and no idea what you did in between. Every calculator on the internet has that limit, and if it has never bothered you then this one is yours for free for good.

EvyOS is the same structure with the work recorded against it. Send the result across and it becomes real goals, tasks or habits with their dates — then the next answer is computed from what actually happened rather than from what you remember typing.

Questions

Goal breakdown generator, answered.

Roughly one every three weeks, which is what this uses. Closer together and they become admin you stop keeping; further apart and you can lose a month without noticing, which is the failure they exist to prevent.
Because that is where goals are abandoned — not at the deadline but in the first fortnight, when there was never a next physical thing to do. "Open the file and fix the header" gets done on a tired Wednesday; "work on the site" does not.
The dates and the spacing are the useful part, plus the rule that each one is something finished rather than a phase. Rewrite the wording — it is your goal and you know the work. What this supplies is the shape and the deadlines falling out of it.
Then the first action changes to finding one person who has done it, because on unfamiliar work your estimate is the least reliable thing in the plan and half an hour of somebody's actual account will move it further than a week of planning.
Send it across: the goal arrives in EvyOS with its target date, each checkpoint and each first action becomes a dated task, and they show up in Today when they are due rather than in a document you have to remember to open.

Keep the answer.
And the record of doing it.

Goals, projects, tasks, habits and skills in one system, with the work logged against what it belonged to.

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