Goals

A Goal is a number you want to move, checked on a schedule. Where a Mission keeps producing work on a topic, a Goal watches a single metric and tells you whether it is heading the right way.

A Goal does not build anything by itself. It reads a metric from a provider plugin, records what it saw, and reports progress toward a target.

When to use a Goal

You want to…	Use a…
Keep producing new Works and Ideas on a theme	Mission
Track "monthly revenue reaches $1,000" and know when it happens	Goal
Track "support tickets stay below 20 a week"	Goal
Build one site from one prompt	Work

Goals and Missions are independent — you can run either without the other.

Creating a Goal

From /goals, choose New Goal. The form at /goals/new collects:

Field	Required	Notes
Title	yes	Up to 200 characters. Shown on the catalog and the detail page.
Description	no	Free context for whoever reads the Goal later.
Provider plugin ID	yes	The metrics plugin that supplies the number — see below.
Metric ID	yes	Which metric to read from that plugin.
Parameters (JSON)	no	Passed to the provider, e.g. { "currency": "usd" }. Must be a JSON object.
Direction	yes	At least (grow to target) or At most (stay under it).
Target value	yes	The number you are aiming at. See the note below.
Unit	yes	Free text — usd, tickets, signups.
Window	yes	Daily, Weekly, Monthly, Total, or Point-in-time.
Deadline	no	Optional date the Goal should be met by.
Check frequency	yes	Minutes between evaluations. Clamped server-side to a 15-minute minimum.

Target value is required, including zero

Leave Target value blank and the form rejects it. This matters more than it looks: a blank field used to be stored as a target of 0, and combined with At least, that produced a Goal meaning "reach at least 0" — satisfied by every possible value, so it reported success immediately and silently.

An explicit 0 is still perfectly valid. "Keep failures at most 0" is a real Goal.

New Goals are created in draft. Nothing is evaluated until you activate them.

The metric source

A Goal reads its number from a metrics provider plugin, identified by the pair (Provider plugin ID, Metric ID). The provider must be installed and enabled for your account before the Goal can read anything.

The form's placeholder text is not a working example

The Provider plugin ID field shows stripe as its placeholder and Metric ID shows income. These are illustrative, not real plugin identifiers. A Goal created by copying them will save and activate without complaint, then fail on every evaluation.

Check which metrics providers are enabled for your account under Plugins before creating a Goal, and use the plugin's own id.

Activation deliberately does not verify that the named provider exists. That keeps you from being blocked while a plugin is being set up — but it also means a typo surfaces only at the first evaluation, not at creation.

Lifecycle

A Goal moves through four states:

Status	Meaning
draft	created, never evaluated. No schedule is running.
active	evaluated on the check frequency.
paused	schedule stopped; history kept.
completed	finished, with an optional outcome recorded.

The action bar shows only the transitions that make sense for the current state — a draft Goal offers Activate and Delete; an active one offers Evaluate now and Pause.

Evaluate now

Runs a check immediately rather than waiting for the next scheduled one. Each evaluation records a sample, so the progress sparkline fills in over time. If no metrics provider is enabled, this is where you will see the failure.

What a Goal does not do

• It does not create Works or Ideas. That is a Mission.
• It does not change anything in your account when a target is hit — it records the outcome.
• It cannot be edited after creation. Title, metric source, target, unit, window and cadence are fixed once the Goal exists; to change any of them, create a new Goal.

Related

• Missions — long-running goals that produce Ideas and Works
• Ideas — proposals a Mission generates
• Budgets and usage — spend limits, which are enforced rather than observed