Achieve Planner

Actions & planning

The tasks module

Actions are the finishable units of work. This guide covers the full machinery: creating things, placing them on the ladder, how the boards grow over time, and every control on a task.

Building blocks: areas, projects, tasks

  • Areas are life spheres — Work, Health, Home — that group projects in the sidebar. Create and manage them in Settings → Areas. (Habits and Goals have their own separate areas, created from those modules' sidebars.)
  • Projects contain tasks. Create one with the + button at the bottom of the sidebar, optionally assigning it an area. Every account has an Inbox — a special project for quick capture that can't be archived or deleted.
  • Tasks are created from the quick-add field at the top of the Inbox and every project view, from the sidebar's + button, or from the Today view's quick-add (which schedules for today as it creates). Automations and Shortcuts can capture too — see API access below.

The planning ladder

Open any task to place it: a month, then a week within that month, then a day, then optionally a time of day. A finer level requires the coarser one above it. Two "nowhere" states are deliberately different:

  • Unplanned — no month chosen at all. The task needs a decision, and the Scheduler queues it up until it gets one.
  • Backlog — an explicit "not now." Backlog tasks sit quietly in their own column and never nag.

Rollover: how the boards grow

The planning scope expands automatically as time passes — new periods appear, old ones age out, and nothing needs manual setup. The windows are intentionally narrow:

  • Months — the Months board always shows the current month plus the next two, with a Backlog column beside them.
  • Weeks — week-level planning is open for the current month only. The next month will open for planning once you enter the last week of the current month — so you can shape the new month before it starts.
  • Days — day-level planning is open for the current week only. During the last two days of the week, the following week will unlock for planning (for example, if your week is set to start on Monday, the new week opens up on the prior Saturday).

This is why you can't assign next month's tasks to a Tuesday in advance: those decisions belong to the future pass that will know more. When a new month or week begins, its finer levels open everywhere at once — dropdowns, boards, and bulk edit all follow the same windows.

Badges

  • Blue badge (unplanned) — in the sidebar, the count of tasks awaiting a planning decision at that view's level. The Scheduler's blue badge is the combined queue across all levels.
  • Red badge (overdue) — the count of tasks whose scheduled slot has passed. On individual task rows, overdue shows as a red ! dot before the title, and a past-due deadline chip turns red.

Overdue never silently reschedules itself — the badge is an invitation to re-decide: push the task later, drop it down the ladder, or let it go.

Scheduling: four ways in

  • The task drawer — open a task and use the cascading Month → Week → Day dropdowns directly.
  • Kanban boards (Months, Weeks, Days) — drag a card between columns, or use the ← and → chevrons on each card to bump it one column over — the keyboard-and-thumb-friendly alternative to dragging. Dropping a card on a column sets that period.
  • Plan, from inside a project — every project view has a "Plan →" link that opens the Months board filtered to just that project, for focused shaping of one effort.
  • The Scheduler — one-task-at-a-time triage with two tabs: Unplanned (tasks with no month) and Overdue (tasks whose slot has passed). Each task offers Month → Week → Day pickers; Skip sends it to the back of the queue, scheduling removes it. Ideal as a daily or weekly sweep to zero.

On each task

  • The circle completes a task. With the optional In Progress status enabled (Settings → Preferences), the circle cycles instead: empty → a blue dash (started) → done. Off by default for two-state simplicity.
  • The Push button — when working in the Today, Tomorrow, or This Week views, a task can be quickly deferred by pressing the Push button, which can push the task back by +1 day, +1 week, or +1 month. The honest way to say "not today" without pretending to know exactly when.
  • Deadlines are separate from the ladder: a deadline is when something is due; the ladder is when you'll work on it. Deadlines show as chips on task rows (red once past), drive the Deadlines view, and can be cleared from the task drawer at any time.
  • Subtasks — a simple checklist inside the task, shown in the drawer and expandable under the task's row with a 2/5-style progress count. No scheduling of their own.
  • Small icons mark a task that has notes or a recurrence rule.

Time of day (optional)

An extra rung below Day, off by default (Settings → Preferences). When enabled, a task with a day can also take a time-of-day slot, and the Today view groups tasks into lanes. The five default lanes — Morning, Midday, Afternoon, Evening, Night — are fully editable in Settings: rename them, reorder them, add or archive them to match how your day actually divides.

Repeating tasks

Two recurrence modes cover the real cases. Mode A re-creates the task when you complete it ("water the plants" — the next one matters only after the last one). Mode B runs on a fixed cadence against a deadline ("pay rent monthly" — the 1st arrives whether or not you finished early).

API access & Shortcuts

Capture shouldn't require opening the app. Settings → API access generates a personal API key that lets anything you automate post tasks straight into your Inbox — the classic use is an iOS Shortcut ("Hey Siri, add to Achieve") or a share-sheet action.

  • The key is shown once at generation and stored only in hashed form — copy it somewhere safe. Rotating generates a replacement and invalidates the old one instantly.
  • Technically it's one endpoint: send a POST to the inbox address shown in Settings, with the key as a Bearer authorization header and a JSON body like {"title": "Pick up dry cleaning"} (an optional "notes" field rides along). In the iOS Shortcuts app, one "Get Contents of URL" action configured that way is the whole shortcut.
  • Captured tasks land in the Inbox unscheduled — they'll meet you in the Scheduler's Unplanned queue for a proper decision later.

Bulk select & edit

Every list view has a bulk-select toggle. In bulk mode, tapping rows selects them (the drag handle becomes a checkbox), and a bar appears with Complete, Edit, and Delete. Bulk Edit moves the whole selection at once: to another project, onto a month/week/day (the same rollover windows apply), or to a new deadline. Most useful at the monthly reshape, when a dozen leftovers need the same honest decision.

Archiving

Projects and areas archive rather than delete — archiving a project tucks it and its tasks out of every view; archiving an area takes its projects along. The Archived page (bottom of the sidebar) lists everything in that state with one-click unarchive, which restores the item and its contents. Archive is the reversible "done with this for now"; delete remains available for the truly discardable. The Inbox can't be archived — it's where new capture lands.

Next: Habits — for the work you repeat instead of finish.