Goals and milestones
Goals and milestones give your project structure and tell Plenar what matters most. This guide covers how to structure them — for how Plenar tracks whether they’ll land on time, see Goal health.
Goals
A goal is the thing your stakeholders care about. Two levers tell Plenar how to plan it:
Priority levels
| Priority | What it means for scheduling |
|---|---|
| P0 | Plenar works hardest to hit this date — it will trade off almost everything else to do it. |
| P1 | Strongly planned toward, and prioritized ahead of P2. |
| P2 | Planned toward, but Plenar will give ground to P0 and P1 when they conflict. |
| P3 | Not planned around. Scheduled for efficiency; Plenar won’t trade off other goals to hit a P3 date. |
| P4 | Same as P3 — a “nice to finish by” date that doesn’t influence scheduling. |
Only P0, P1, and P2 goals have their target dates actively planned around. P3 and P4 keep their dates for your reference, but missing them doesn’t change how Plenar schedules other work.
Creating a goal
From the dashboard: open the Scope tab and click Add Goal. Set the title, priority, and an optional target date.
From Claude Code: describe the goal and let the agent create it.
Milestones
Milestones are intermediate deliverables inside a goal. Under Core Analytics Engine, Dashboard MVP and Query Engine & Reports are milestones.
The key difference from goals: a milestone’s dates are computed, not set. Its ETA is the latest end date of the tasks inside it — you never type a milestone date, it derives from the work. A milestone can carry an optional target date that acts as a mini-deadline within the goal.
When to use milestones
Use them when a goal has distinct phases that ship in sequence. If Platform Foundation has an auth phase and a data-ingestion phase, each is a milestone — Auth & User Management and Data Ingestion Pipeline. Skip them for small goals (fewer than ~5 tasks) — the extra hierarchy just adds noise.
Committed milestones
Once a milestone has at least one In Progress or Done task, Plenar treats it as committed: it prioritizes finishing the remaining tasks in that milestone before starting new ones. The effect is that once your team starts a milestone, Plenar helps them finish it before picking up something else — less context-switching, less work left half-done.
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 two goals, split it into separate tasks.
Do I have to use milestones? No. They’re optional. Small goals are clearer without them; large multi-phase goals benefit from them.
What happens to a goal with no target date? Plenar still computes its ETA from the tasks inside, but it never shows as Off Track because there’s no date to miss. Use this when timing is informational rather than committed.
Can I reorder goals by priority? Priority controls scheduling, not display order — though the sidebar does list goals P0 first. Within one priority, goals appear in creation order.
What to do next
- Goal health — how ETAs and target dates decide whether a goal is On Track, At Risk, or Off Track, and how to recover a slip.
- Manage your schedule — the edit → preview → apply loop for changing priorities and dates.
- Dependencies — sequence the tasks inside a milestone.
- How scheduling works — why priorities produce the schedule they do.