Goals & Milestones
Goals and milestones give your project structure and deadlines. Plenar uses them to decide what matters most and when to sound the alarm.
Goals
A goal is a business objective. “Launch the auth system.” “Ship the billing integration.” “Complete the SOC 2 audit.” Goals are the things your stakeholders care about.
What makes goals special
Goals have target dates and priorities. These are the two levers you use to tell Plenar what matters:
- Target date — when you need the goal done. This is a soft constraint: Plenar tries to meet it, but will still produce a valid schedule if it cannot. The gap between the target date and the computed ETA is how you measure risk.
- Priority — how hard Plenar should try to meet the deadline.
Priority levels
| Priority | Label | What it means |
|---|---|---|
| P0 | Critical | Plenar treats this deadline as nearly inviolable. It will sacrifice almost everything else to meet it. |
| P1 | High | Strong deadline enforcement. Will be prioritized over P2 goals. |
| P2 | Medium | Moderate enforcement. Plenar cares, but will trade P2 compliance for P0/P1 if forced. |
| P3 | Low | No deadline enforcement. Scheduled for efficiency. Plenar will not sacrifice other goals to meet P3 deadlines. |
| P4 | Minimal | Same as P3. Useful for tracking “nice to complete by” dates without influencing scheduling decisions. |
Note: Only P0, P1, and P2 goals have their deadlines actively enforced. P3 and P4 goals have target dates for your reference, but missing them does not affect how Plenar schedules other work.
Goal ETA and health
Plenar computes an ETA for each goal: the latest end date of all tasks contributing to it. If the ETA is after the target date, the goal is off track (red). If the ETA is on or before the target date, it is on track (green).
Goal health is visible throughout the dashboard — in the sidebar, the summary view, and the detail panel.
Creating goals
From the dashboard: Open the Scope Table, click Add Goal. Set the title, priority, and optional target date.
From Claude Code:
"Create a P1 goal called 'API v2 Launch' with a target date of May 15th"Milestones
Milestones are intermediate deliverables within a goal. “OAuth integration” might be a milestone under the “Launch auth system” goal.
Key difference from goals
Milestone dates are computed, not set. A milestone’s ETA is the latest end date of all tasks assigned to it. You do not enter a milestone date — it derives from the work inside.
Milestones can optionally have target dates, which work like mini-deadlines within the goal.
When to use milestones
Use milestones when a goal has distinct phases that ship independently. If your “Platform Migration” goal has a database phase, an API phase, and a frontend phase, each of those is a milestone.
Skip milestones for small goals with fewer than 5 tasks. The extra hierarchy adds visual noise without much organizational value.
Committed milestones
When a milestone has at least one In Progress or Done task, it is considered “committed.” Plenar gives special treatment to committed milestones:
- Remaining tasks in the milestone are prioritized to finish before new milestones begin
- This reduces context-switching and keeps work-in-progress low
The effect: once your team starts a milestone, Plenar helps them finish it before starting something new.
Risk detection
Plenar automatically detects when goals are at risk of missing their target dates.
How it works
- Plenar computes a baseline ETA for each goal
- If the ETA exceeds the target date by more than the threshold (default: 5 days), the goal is marked at risk
- At-risk goals trigger expanded optimization — more tasks are freed for rescheduling to try to recover the deadline
The ETA threshold is configurable in project settings. A 5-day threshold means Plenar starts actively rearranging work when a goal is more than 5 days late. Below that threshold, minor slips are tolerated.
Common questions
Can a task belong to multiple goals? No. A task belongs to one milestone, which belongs to one goal. If work contributes to multiple goals, break it into separate tasks.
What happens to a goal with no target date? Plenar still computes an ETA based on the tasks inside. The goal will never show as “off track” because there is no deadline to miss. Use this for goals where timing is informational rather than committal.
Can I reorder goals by priority? Goal priority controls scheduling behavior, not display order. In the sidebar, goals are ordered by priority (P0 first, P4 last). Within the same priority, they appear in creation order.