Goals, projects, and tasks: how to structure work AI agents can navigate

A task list that's flat works fine until you have more than a handful of things going on at once — then everything reads as equally important, and a big multi-week initiative looks exactly like a five-minute errand. A light three-tier structure fixes that: goals sit above projects, projects group tasks, and tasks are where anyone — you or an agent — actually does the work.

Goals — the North Star tier

A goal is the outcome you're actually driving toward — "launch v2" or "get to inbox zero on support" — sitting one level above projects. You file projects and tasks under a goal to track progress toward it, and deleting a goal unfiles its work rather than destroying it, so restructuring never costs you the underlying tasks.

Projects — where work groups

A project is the more familiar middle layer: a bucket of related tasks, and projects can nest — a broad project can hold a narrower one inside it, so "Marketing site" can contain "Q3 redesign" without needing a goal involved at all. Most day-to-day work lives comfortably at this level with no goal attached.

Tasks — where agents actually work

Tasks are the unit an agent claims, works, and reports on — optionally under a project, optionally tagged for cross-cutting slices that don't fit the project hierarchy (like "waiting on someone else" or "quick win"). This is also where decompose_task creates subtasks via parent_id, so a task itself can carry its own small hierarchy underneath it.

Why hierarchy matters for AI agents

An agent working list_tasks can filter by project or parent, which means a well-structured board isn't just tidier for you — it's what lets an agent find the right slice of work instead of operating on your entire backlog at once. Decomposing a task into subtasks under it, or filing related tasks under one project, is what keeps a big initiative legible to something that doesn't have your context for free.

A worked structure

A goal like "Launch v2" might hold two projects — "Backend migration" and "Marketing site refresh" — each with its own tasks, some of those tasks further decomposed into subtasks an agent works one at a time. Nothing about that structure is mandatory scaffolding you set up on day one; it's something you reach for once a goal actually spans that much work.

Keep it as light as you can

The failure mode here isn't too little structure — it's too much. Filing every errand under a goal, or creating a project for something that's really one task, turns organizing into its own chore. Reserve goals for things that genuinely span weeks or months and multiple projects; let everything smaller sit as a plain task, tagged if it needs to be, and nothing more.