Organising your workload

Goals

Goals are things you are striving to achieve, with a longer term perspective than you have when you are thinking about projects and tasks. There are three types of goal, each with a different perspective:

•	Lifetime goals

•	Long-term goals

•	Short-term goals

Long-term goals can contribute to lifetime goals. And short-term goals can contribute to long-term or lifetime goals.

For example, you might set "Be healthy" as a lifetime goal. And you could set "Keep fit" as a long-term goal that contributes to it. If you decide to take up jogging, you could have "Start jogging" as a short-term goal. To get you started, you could have "Couch to 5K" as a project, containing tasks like "Download Couch to 5K Podcast" and "Buy some running shoes".

To add, rename or delete a goal, or to view or edit its properties, go to the appropriate item in the Edit menu.

To assign a task to a goal, set its Goal property. See Task Properties.

To assign several tasks to a goal all at once, select them, press F4, and choose the goal. Or hold down the Ctrl key and drag them onto the goal in the Filter panel.

If you rename a goal, all of the tasks with that goal are adjusted automatically.

To see all the tasks assigned to a goal, select the goal in the Filter Panel.

Goal Tree

You can choose how you want goals to be shown in the Filter Panel. If you choose View->Use Goal List, the goals are listed by type (lifetime, long-term or short-term). If you choose View->Use Goal Tree, the goals are listed in a tree structure, so you can see which goals contribute to which longer-term goals.

When you are using Goal Tree view, the task filter takes account of contributing tasks. So using the above example, filtering on Be Healthy would show you all tasks assigned to Be healthy, Keep fit and Start jogging.

You can drag and drop goals within the tree structure. The goal type of the goal being dragged is adjusted accordingly. You can't make a goal contribute to a short-term goal.

Goal Progress

You can see what progress you are making towards any of your goals. Select Edit->Goal->Goal Properties, and choose the Progress tab.

The progress report tells you how many tasks are completed and uncompleted for this goal on its own, and for this goal including any contributing goals.

The 30-day chain of completed tasks looks at the last 30 days and shows you on which of those days tasks were completed towards the goal, or any of its contributing goals. To make sure you are doing things every day towards a goal, try to keep an unbroken chain for the whole 30 days.

Archiving

You can archive goals when you have finished with them. Click on Archive in the main menu. When a goal is archived, it disappears from the filter panel and the drop-down lists of goals. All tasks assigned to archived goals are hidden from the Task List, although they are included in search results.

When you are using Goal Tree view, archiving a goal also archives any lower level goals that contribute to it.