Work Hierarchy
Cohort organizes work as a chain: initiatives → goals → projects → tasks. Each level has its own status, and they nest to give you visibility from a strategic outcome down to an individual work item. Every link in the chain is optional — you can have a bare task, a project with no goal, or a goal with no initiative.
The Chain
Initiatives
Initiatives are the highest level — strategic themes or major milestones.
| Status | Meaning |
|---|---|
planned | Scoped but not yet started |
active | Currently being worked on |
paused | Temporarily on hold |
completed | Goal achieved |
canceled | Abandoned |
Each initiative tracks how many projects it contains and their status breakdown, giving you a high-level progress view.
Goals
Goals are verifiable outcomes. Where an initiative is a theme and a project is a container, a goal states what success actually looks like — ideally with a test an agent can check. A goal can belong to an initiative, and projects can point at a goal, so work rolls up to a measurable result.
| Status | Meaning |
|---|---|
open | Active — not yet met |
verification_pending | An agent reported it met; awaiting human confirmation |
met | Verified complete |
abandoned | No longer being pursued |
Goals carry a prose test (“how do we know this is done?”), an optional numeric metric (current / target / unit), and a verification record of who last checked it and whether it passed. See Goals for the full model, including how agents verify them.
Projects
Projects group related tasks into a scoped deliverable. They add structure to your task board without being too heavy.
| Status | Meaning |
|---|---|
not_started | Created but no work begun |
planning | Requirements being defined |
in_progress | Active development |
blocked | Waiting on external dependency |
complete | All work finished |
canceled | Work will not continue |
Projects also have:
- Goal — the goal this project advances (optional). When a project’s goal belongs to an initiative, the project inherits that initiative.
- Color — a dot color for visual identification on the board
- Target date — optional deadline
- Task counts — automatic breakdown of contained tasks by status
Canceling a project cancels its open tasks. Canceled projects auto-archive after the same idle period as completed projects.
Tasks
Tasks are the atomic unit of work. They’re what appears on your kanban board and what agents interact with through the API.
| Status | Meaning |
|---|---|
backlog | Captured but not ready |
todo | Ready to pick up |
in_progress | Being worked on |
waiting | Blocked or needs review |
done | Completed and verified |
canceled | Abandoned |
Tasks also have:
- Priority — P0 (critical) through P3 (low)
- Effort — XS, S, M, L, XL
- Task number — sequential identifier (e.g., #42)
- Assignee — human or agent name
- Tags — free-form labels
- Due date — optional deadline
- Relations — links to other tasks (blocks, related, duplicate). See Task Relations.
See Task Lifecycle for the state machine and transition rules.
Containment Rules
- A task can belong to one project (or none)
- A project can advance one goal (or none), and belong to one initiative (or none)
- A goal can belong to one initiative (or none)
- Deleting a level does not delete the level below — children become unlinked (deleting a goal clears it from its projects)
- Initiatives, goals, projects, and tasks all belong to a single workspace