Understanding the key terms and what they represent within the product is essential to understanding how the ‘Good Day’ product delivers its personal planning features.
Goal #
A goal is an ambition to achieve, build or complete something over an extended timeframe.
Examples of goals can include:
- Purchase a new house
- Plan an important vacation
- Finding a new job
- Riding 500km on your bike in a month
- Learning a new skill
- Losing weight
- Changing attitudes
- Writing a book
Typically, a goal has a lifespan that runs over multiple weeks or months and a target timeframe.
A goal will have a ‘scheduled start’ and a ‘scheduled finish’. If the goal context is set by some other party, then a goal can have a ‘required by’ finish date.
A goal will have an associated ‘action plan’ where the steps required to complete the goal are defined, and/or the behaviour changes required to meet the goal are set. The action plan may include sub goals.
A goal may have metrics that can be used to track progress, including:
- ‘Lag’ metrics that define a finish line for the goal. An example of a ‘lag’ metric could be the target weight for a goal associated with losing weight or completing all the subordinate tasks associated with a goal
- ‘Lead’ metrics can be used to track progress towards the finish line.
Habit #
A habit is a recurring behaviour or action a user aims to develop, maintain, or improve over time. Habits can be positive (e.g., exercising daily, reading before bed) or negative (e.g., reducing screen time, cutting back on sugar), and tracking them helps reinforce consistency and accountability.
By consistently tracking habits, users can gradually integrate positive behaviours into their routines and work towards long-term personal growth and self-improvement.
A habit will have a tracking interval (daily or weekly) and a completion type of either:
- ‘Done’ – the habit need only be completed once over the tracking period interval (e.g. going for a walk every day)
- ‘Count’ – the habit must be repeated several times each tracking period interval (e.g. drinking three glasses of water a day).
- ‘Accumulate’. – the habit must accumulate progress over the tracking period interval (e.g. ride 100km a week on your bike)
Habit adoption success is measured in terms of a target completion percentage over a given rolling period, e.g., 90% completion of a daily habit over 35 days.
Task #
A task is a specific action or item that needs to be completed within a given timeframe. Tasks are typically part of a larger goal or project and help users stay organised, prioritise their workload, and track their progress.
By managing tasks effectively, users can improve productivity, reduce stress, and ensure that essential responsibilities are completed on time.
A task will have:
- Title – a description of what the task represents
- Scheduled date – the timeline for when the user wants to schedule work on the task.
- Required by date – an optional date for when some other party would like the task completed by.
- Priority level – indicating the task’s relative importance to other tasks.
- Story points – a number that reflects the user’s effort to complete the task.
- Status – a task state is set to ‘open’ when it is first created and can transition through several other states until it is completed (e.g. ‘In progress’, ‘on hold’, ‘delegated’, ‘closed’, or ‘completed’).
A task may have its own ‘checklist’ of actions to complete. Using checklists intelligently avoids creating many different tasks for small, related steps.
A task may be defined as a recurring task that will repeat itself at a specified time interval.
A task may be linked to a goal by being an item in the goal action plan.
MIT (most important task) #
The Good Plan design uses a term called ‘MIT’ or ‘most important task’. A task is classed as an ‘MIT’ if it has one of the top priorities. By default, this is a task with a priority setting of 1 or 2, but this can be configured to suit the user’s requirements.
Good planning practice dictates that the user should prioritise work on completing ‘MIT’ tasks before anything else.
Plan #
A plan represents a snapshot of planned tasks and habits scheduled to be completed within a defined time period (e.g. today, this week, this month, this quarter).
When a plan is defined and saved, the user can employ ‘Good Day’ to track progress against the plan. The use of plans is an essential element to reflecting on the accuracy and sensibility of the users current planning process.
Dates in ‘Good Day’ #
With ‘Good Day, ’ dates are used to help define the start and finish dates for various things, such as tasks, habits, and goals.
With ‘Good Day ‘, a date may be set as a:
- Undefined, it has no date setting.
- Specific date, e.g. Monday, 3 February 2025)
- Relative date, e.g. tomorrow, this week, next week, or next month
The use of relative dates is essential to how “Good Day” has been designed to align with how people work. Most of the time, when considering when to tackle a task, a person will not have a specific date in mind. Instead, they will think along the lines of scheduling it for “next week”, “this month” or “in two weeks time”.