From idea to done: plans, tasks & calendar

From idea to done: plans, tasks and the calendar

The front half of Station is about thinking. This is the back half: turning the ideas that survived being challenged into work that actually gets finished — and keeping every view of that work in sync, because underneath it’s all the same rows.

● As at 5 September 2026 · one task record · four views · a due date is a day, not a time

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1. Promote an idea into work

A solid idea doesn’t get retyped somewhere else — it gets promoted in place. From any idea, in one press:

  • Promote to plan — when it’s a multi-step arc. Safe to press twice: if a plan already exists for that idea, you just land on it.
  • Promote to task — when it’s a single thing to do.
  • Research this — when it needs grounding first. It opens Research pointed at the idea; it doesn’t start a run, because the depth is my call.

The idea stays linked to whatever it became, and the plan card says which idea it came from, so the "why" behind a plan never gets lost.

One idea open in full, showing the body, the model's follow-up questions with my typed answers underneath, a completeness breakdown, and buttons to research it or promote it to a plan or task.
One idea open in full, showing the body, the model’s follow-up questions with my typed answers underneath, a completeness breakdown, and buttons to research it or promote it to a plan or task.

2. Plans — the arcs I’m on

A plan is a sequence of tasks with a finish line. A single thing to do is a task; a set of them with an order is a plan.

Here’s the part I didn’t expect to like as much as I do: a plan has no priority or due date of its own. Both are borrowed from the tasks inside it —

  • its priority is the highest priority among its still-open tasks;
  • its due date is the earliest due date among its still-open tasks;
  • its progress is simply done ÷ total.

So a plan’s deadline moves on its own as I tick things off. That looked like a bug the first time I saw it. It isn’t — it’s the next real deadline, and it means a plan can never quietly claim a date that nothing inside it is actually working towards.

Plan status is a separate idea from archiving. A plan is active, done or abandoned; archive just tidies it out of the default view. Deleting sends it to the recycle bin, where it stays restorable for 30 days.

The Plans page: cards for each plan with a progress bar, a borrowed due date, and a status word.
The Plans page: cards for each plan with a progress bar, a borrowed due date, and a status word.

3. Inside a plan — board, list, and a Gantt strip

Open a plan and you get three ways to look at the same tasks:

  • Board — cards in columns, grouped by status by default here.
  • List — a sortable table with one button per status on each row, so a task can be moved without opening it.
  • Gantt — a strip underneath, drawn from whatever has a due date. A task with no due date simply isn’t on it.

Alongside them: the ideas that fed the plan, a few quick stats, and a running notes and log panel. Adding, moving or deleting a task returns me to the same view, grouping and sort I was already using — which sounds trivial until you’ve lost your place fifty times.

One plan open, showing its tasks as a board, the tabs for List and Gantt views, the ideas that fed the plan, its statistics, and a running notes and log panel.
One plan open, showing its tasks as a board, the tabs for List and Gantt views, the ideas that fed the plan, its statistics, and a running notes and log panel.

4. Tasks — a board whose columns mean what I want

The Tasks page is everything I’ve said I’d do: the tasks that stand alone and the ones that live inside plans.

Standalone tasks get a drag-and-drop board, and Group by changes what a column means:

  • Bucket — the default here. Columns I invented myself, plus a No bucket column that always exists. Deleting a bucket column doesn’t delete its cards; they move to No bucket.
  • Status — three fixed columns: not started, in progress, completed.

(A plan’s own board defaults to grouping by status, while this page defaults to bucket. Same board, opposite starting point.)

Underneath the board, In plans is a flat list of every task that lives inside a plan — so nothing can hide inside a plan I’d forgotten about.

Two things worth knowing before they surprise you:

  • The four chips at the top — Active · Completed · All · Archived — clear the filters below them when pressed. They carry only the sort order. Set your filters again after switching.
  • A task has no category of its own. It matches a category through the workspace it belongs to, so a task outside a workspace never matches any category filter.
The Tasks board grouped by bucket, with columns I created myself alongside a No bucket column, the Active, Completed, All and Archived chips above it, and a flat In plans list underneath.
The Tasks board grouped by bucket, with columns I created myself alongside a No bucket column, the Active, Completed, All and Archived chips above it, and a flat In plans list underneath.

5. Calendar — due dates, laid out by month

Despite the name, this is not a diary. There are no meetings, events or appointments on it. Everything on it is a task with a due date.

A due date is a day, not a moment — there’s no time picker anywhere in Station, nothing shows a time beside a date, and a task lands on the day I picked in my own time zone rather than jumping a day either side depending on when I look. A task due today stays out of "overdue" for the whole of that day.

Clicking a task opens its editor over the calendar, so the page reads like a calendar and edits like the task list. Completed tasks stay visible rather than vanishing, so a month reads as what happened as well as what’s coming. And on a phone the month becomes a date-by-date agenda rather than squeezing seven columns onto the screen.

The one thing that catches me out: a task with no due date never appears here, in any month. If something’s missing, that’s almost always why.

The Calendar as a month grid, with tasks placed on their due dates. Each task shows a status glyph and the status written as a word, and a line naming the plan, workspace, or standalone.
The Calendar as a month grid, with tasks placed on their due dates. Each task shows a status glyph and the status written as a word, and a line naming the plan, workspace, or standalone.

6. Work — one summary, three different rules

The Work page is the "what do I do now, and in what order" screen. Three columns, and they look symmetrical but aren’t:

  • Today and overdue — anything due by the end of today and not finished.
  • This week — unfinished work due in the next seven days.
  • Active plans — plans still marked active, most recently touched first.

It’s deliberately read-only: nothing on this page changes anything, every control is a link somewhere else. The headline counts are true totals even though the visible lists are kept short.

Same caveat as the calendar: this page is built entirely from due dates, so undated work is invisible here no matter how important it is.

The Work summary: three columns headed Today and overdue, This week, and Active plans, each with a total count above a trimmed list.
The Work summary: three columns headed Today and overdue, This week, and Active plans, each with a total count above a trimmed list.

7. Who actually does it

In July this section said delegation was on the roadmap: "hand plan steps to non-human assignees and let them run." Since 28 July 2026 it isn’t on the roadmap any more.

A task’s assignee can be me, or one of the agents that runs on a schedule — a backup guardian, a container-update monitor, a groundskeeper. Conversational agents can’t own work, deliberately: something that only exists while you’re talking to it can’t be responsible for a deadline.

And an agent that owns a task can tick it off, which means the board sometimes moves on its own overnight. That took some getting used to.

One source of truth

The thing that makes all of this hold together: a task is a single row. The plan’s board, the Tasks list, the Calendar, the Work summary and the workspace it might live in are all just different views of the same records. Tick something off in one place and it’s done everywhere. There is no second to-do app to keep in sync, and nothing to reconcile.

That’s also why the counts can be trusted. When Work says nine things are due today, that’s nine rows — not nine copies of something that also exists in three other lists.

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