Goals

Goals are optional, and recommended. Every project already has a progress summary the Captain keeps current whether or not you set any. Goals add a layer on top of it: the high-level outcomes the project is working toward, tracked over time with a percentage, a health, and a chart.

Tasks are the individual pieces of work on the board; goals are the outcomes those tasks add up to. As the admin, they let you see how far along a project is and where things stand without working through the board task by task. Adding one or two makes a project's progress much easier to read, and adding none costs you nothing else.

A goal is an outcome or milestone you want the project to achieve, a state of the world you care about: a level to reach ("reach 100 active customers"), or a level to reach and hold ("keep the error rate under 1%"). Its measurement judges results, never activity. "Monitor the watchlist daily" or "deliver a weekly report" is not a goal; it is recurring operational work, which the team runs as a task that stays open (see the callout below). A one-off deliverable with a fixed done state, such as a document to produce, a feature to ship or a one-time analysis, belongs on the board as a task too, and the Captain can link it to a goal. Goals are re-checked on their cadence until you archive them, so a reached milestone stays tracked, and held, instead of slipping unnoticed.

You set the goals; the Captain keeps them up to date. You don't have to remember to update a status or move a slider. The Captain re-checks each goal on its schedule and writes a fresh estimate.

The Captain (or the CEO) can also suggest goals, but goals start with you. During a project's initial onboarding the Captain asks what you want the project to achieve and forms suggestions from your answers; it shouldn't invent goals you didn't ask for. A suggestion isn't a goal yet: it appears as an Approve / Deny card on the task thread and on the Goals page, and only becomes a real goal once you approve it. Deny it and it's dismissed.

There is no cron in Hezo, and goals aren't one either. Hezo has no cron or timed-trigger system to configure; repeating work runs on the heartbeat: agents wake on their own cadence and revisit the open tasks assigned to them. Recurring operational work, such as a daily monitoring sweep or a weekly report, is a standing task: an ordinary task that stays open and is never marked done, with each round filed as a sub-task under it (see Recurring work and standing tasks). Goals track the outcomes you want instead. On each due check the Captain assesses progress and turns the assessment into steering (a comment on an in-flight task) or new tasks. A goal's check frequency schedules the Captain's re-assessment, not the work itself.

The Goals page

Goals sits in the project menu, directly under Inbox. The page shows each goal as a panel with its progress, health, and latest status; click a panel to open the goal's own page, where its full progress chart and history live. An Active / Archived filter switches between live goals and retired ones.

The project Dashboard has a goals card beside the work: the four goals most worth a decision, worst health first, each with its progress bar, health and deadline, and a link to the rest. Its metric strip also shows overall goal progress and how many goals are off track.

Setting a goal

From the Goals page choose Create Goal (or the + button in the Goals header). A goal has:

Goal name - the objective in a line (e.g. "Reach 100 active customers").
Measurement - the precise definition of how you'll know the goal is achieved (e.g. "100 active paid subscriptions in Stripe"). This is the bar the Captain measures against, so the more concrete it is, the more honest its progress estimates.
Suggested actions (optional) - guidance on what the Captain should do or check when it assesses the goal (e.g. "read the signup-funnel numbers, not just the task board"). Leave it blank to let the Captain decide.
Deadline (optional) - when the goal should be met. The Captain weighs progress against this date when it sets the goal's health, and once the deadline has passed an unmet goal is checked on every heartbeat, regardless of its check frequency, until it reaches 100% or is archived. At 100% the goal drops back to its normal check frequency (and the every-heartbeat urgency returns if its progress later slips below 100 again).
Check frequency - how often the Captain re-assesses the goal: daily (the default), weekly, or monthly. This schedules the Captain's assessment, not the team's work - pick it by how often the measurement meaningfully changes: daily for fast-moving measurements, monthly for slow-moving outcomes.

The create and edit forms keep the SMART framework (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Time-bound) in front of you as a reminder. A project can have any number of goals; until you've set one, a dot pulses next to Goals in the menu. Editing a goal (from the goal's own page or the panel's edit control) reopens the same form.

How the Captain tracks goals

Goal assessment rides along with the progress update - the standalone Captain run that rewrites the progress summary. That run happens whether or not the project has goals; when it does, the same run also picks up whichever goals are due and assesses them all at once.

A goal is due when its check frequency has come round (last checked longer ago than its cadence, or never checked) or once its deadline has passed - a goal past its deadline is always checked and never skipped while it stays active. Goals that aren't due on either count are skipped; the progress update still runs, with no goal work to do. A due goal also makes a progress update due, so setting goals means the progress summary refreshes at least as often as your shortest check frequency.

For each due goal the Captain assesses real progress toward the outcome - reading the relevant tasks, comments, and project state rather than just counting finished tasks - and records three things:

a progress percentage (0-100) - its honest estimate of how far along the goal is,
a health - a coloured pill that reads at a glance: on track (green), at risk (amber), or off track (red); a brand-new goal shows not assessed (grey) until its first check,
a status blurb - a short paragraph on where the goal stands and what's needed next. Any tasks, pull requests, GitHub issues or commits it references become links you can click straight through to.

Because each check is recorded, every goal shows a progress chart of how its percentage has moved over time, so you can see momentum or a stall.

These progress updates are not done inside a task - they're standalone Captain runs. The recent progress update runs for the whole project appear at the bottom of the project Dashboard, along with the Run now button that triggers one on demand. Each goal's own page also has a Progress update runs section showing just the runs that did something for that goal - the progress it set and any tasks it created or commented on toward the goal show inline, and each run expands to reveal the status summary it recorded.

During the same run the Captain also rewrites the project progress summary, so the dashboard stays in step with the goal estimates.

Goals aren't finished at 100%

Reaching 100% doesn't end tracking. A goal that hits 100% stays in rotation and keeps being re-assessed on its check frequency, because progress can move back below 100: a goal like "reach 100 active customers" is met one week and slips to 95 the next when customers churn. When that happens the Captain lowers the percentage (explaining why in the blurb) and the progress chart shows the dip.

That also means goals can be deliberately never-ending - a standing objective like "keep the error rate under 1%" or "respond to every support request within a day" is measured continuously, forever, and sits around 100% while it's being met. The only way to stop the Captain checking a goal is to archive it (below) - do that when a goal has served its purpose and is no longer worth tracking.

Archiving

The Goals page defaults to an Active view and has an Archived filter to see the rest. Archiving a goal (from the archive button on its card, or the same button on the goal's own page) sets it aside without deleting it: an archived goal is no longer checked - the Captain skips it entirely and never updates its status or files work for it.

Because that retires something the team is working toward, archiving asks you to confirm first, naming the goal in the prompt so you can tell it apart from the card next to it. Nothing is sent until you confirm. Unarchiving needs no confirmation - it is the undo of that action - and brings the goal straight back into rotation.

Goals and the board

When the Captain decides a goal needs a push, it either comments on an existing in-flight task to steer or unblock it, or files new tasks through the normal delegation flow and links them to the goal. It doesn't create work for its own sake: if tasks already in the backlog or in flight will advance the goal, the Captain leaves the board alone, because the job of a progress update is to judge whether the project is on course. The Captain never re-opens a closed task; if something needs redoing it files a fresh task that points back at the original.

The percentage is the Captain's estimate, so treat the blurb as the primary signal and the percentage as a quick gauge of direction. The two together tell you where a project is headed without reading every task.

Goals are a per-project concept. The global HQ project does not have goals.