Missions¶

A mission is an effort that runs over weeks and needs steering along the way. "Launch the self-serve tier." "Win the comparison against our closest competitor." "Rebuild the outbound sequence."

It is the largest unit in Questo, and it is the one that earns its keep slowly. A mission gives every task inside it a frame, so you stop restating the goal in every prompt, and it gives the daily routines something to plan against.

Two ways in¶

A mission holds two things at once: the pursuit (the direction of the work) and the impact (the measurable outcomes).

Which one you start from depends on how you think. Product and content marketers usually start from the pursuit: "rebuild the docs experience". Growth and sales operators usually start from the impact: "get trial-to-paid from 8% to 15%". Both are legitimate ways to open a mission, and Questo will not make you invent the other half before you can save.

If you have a goal but no metric yet, write the goal. If you have a number but have not decided how you will move it, write the number. The missing half tends to arrive within a week.

Campaigns and motions¶

There is no field for the type of a mission. There is one dial: whether it has a target date.

A mission with a target date is a campaign. It ends. "Ship the pricing page by 30 September." The date is what the agent measures urgency against, and a mission drifting towards a date it will miss is what a health verdict is for.

A mission without one is a motion. It is always on. "Keep the comparison pages current." Nothing about it is worse for being open-ended, and forcing a fake deadline onto a motion just makes every status report wrong.

The playbook¶

The mission's summary is its one line, so anyone can see what this mission is at a glance. Under the header sits the playbook proper: five sections the agent reads before every plan it writes, and writes back to as the mission moves.

The playbook is the highest-leverage thing on a mission, for the same reason the knowledge base is the highest-leverage thing in the workspace: it is read on every run, so a sentence you sharpen once pays off every morning afterwards.

Two of them deserve a note.

Baseline is fixed on purpose. It is the ground the mission started from, and its whole value is that it does not move. If you keep it current, you delete the only record of how far you have come.

Rules here are mission-scoped. A constraint that applies to all your work belongs in a workspace rule instead. "No competitor names in this campaign" is a mission rule. "Never claim we are the market leader" is a workspace rule.

The playbook shows who last wrote it and when, so you can tell your own words from the agent's.

Status¶

A mission is in one of four states.

• Idea is the parked state. It is written down and it is not being worked.
• Active means the daily routines plan against it.
• Paused means stop planning it, keep everything.
• Completed means it is finished.

Only active missions get daily planning. This is the control worth reaching for when your inbox is noisy: a workspace with nine active missions produces plans for nine missions every morning, and no one has nine priorities.

Intensity¶

Intensity says how hard the daily planner pushes a given mission. It has three settings and the default is Auto, which is not the middle of a scale but the absence of an override: plan at whatever pace the mission's own strategy, targets and target date imply.

Min is reactive only. Plan when something happens, otherwise leave it alone. Good for a mission you want tracked but not driven.

Max searches wider for signal and plans more boldly against the roadmap. Good for the one mission this quarter that actually matters.

Intensity is not a task quota and not a cadence. It does not promise you three tasks a day at Max and one at Min.

Stages¶

A mission carries the funnel stages it touches: awareness, acquisition, conversion, activation, retention, monetization, operations.

A mission can carry several, because real work rarely sits in one. This is labelling for you, so the missions list is scannable, and light context for the agent. It changes nothing about how the mission runs.

Targets¶

A target is a measurable outcome. A mission can have up to three.

Three is a real cap and it is the point of the feature. A mission with seven targets has no targets, because nothing has been chosen. If you cannot get under three, you are probably looking at two missions.

Ask the agent to add a target and describe what you want measured. You can rename or remove targets yourself from the mission page.

Targets are updated, not versioned¶

This trips people up, so it is worth being precise.

The target itself is a spec, and you edit it in place. Fixing a typo in "Sign 3 desing partners" does not create a second target.

The target updates are the history. Each time the agent observes where a target stands, it records a new update with the date, and previous ones are never overwritten. That series is the mission's actual progress, and it is what a status verdict reads.

So: one target, many updates over time. If you want to change what you are measuring rather than record where it stands, that is an edit to the target, and yes, the old updates will now sit under a slightly different question. That is usually fine. If the change is fundamental, remove the target and ask for a new one.

Target updates arrive on their own. The mission update routine writes them each morning from insights and from the work that shipped. When nothing has measured a target, the insight request routine will ask you for the number directly, because a target nobody has observed is the one thing that blinds the planner.

The roadmap¶

A mission has a roadmap, and you give it at least one week when you create the mission.

A roadmap week is a short block of intent: what that week is for, why, and what it deliberately excludes. It is not a task list. Work specific enough to execute is a task; the roadmap is where work that is not yet concrete enough to be a task waits.

Weeks are sparse. A week nobody has planned simply has no entry, and that is not a gap to fill for tidiness. Near weeks should be specific and far weeks can be a line or two, because the detail genuinely does arrive as the week approaches. Writing week nine in full detail today is work you will throw away.

The roadmap is what stops each morning's plan from being invented from scratch. Without it, the planner has your mission objective and today's date, and it will produce something plausible and directionless.

When reality breaks the roadmap, and it will, the agent rewrites the affected weeks before planning against them. A slipped launch, a dead bet, a blocked dependency: these move the plan rather than being planned around.

How a mission iterates¶

This is the part that runs without you. Over one day, on an active mission, with the default routines on:

Late afternoon. The extractor reads your connected tools and captures what bears on this mission as insights. Then the insight request routine looks for what it still cannot know: where a target stands with nothing measuring it, a decision only you can make. It asks up to three questions per mission, in one inbox card, each with a reason for asking. Your one-line answers become insights too.

Next morning. The mission update routine writes a diagnosis: what changed, where the targets stand now, and a health verdict of on track, at risk, off track or no data. It reads the update sequence, not just today, so the verdict is about trajectory rather than a single day. It changes nothing else, deliberately: it observes, it does not act.

Then, the same morning. The planning routine takes that diagnosis, this week's roadmap focus and the tasks in flight, and proposes one day plan per active mission: a win condition for the day and the handful of tasks that serve it, each with a one-line rationale saying which slice of the win condition it advances. It arrives in your inbox as one card.

You decide. Approve the tasks worth doing, reject the rest. Approving turns them into real tasks and the plan goes live.

Sunday. The weekly report recaps what actually happened, in the past tense, per mission. It proposes nothing. You read it and clear it.

The chain is ordered, not just scheduled: the planner waits for the morning update, and the insight request waits for the extractor. Each stage is reading what the one before it wrote.

Day plans¶

A day plan is one mission's gameplan for one day, and it persists rather than evaporating once you have read it.

Its spine is the win condition: what would make today count for this mission. The tasks exist to serve it, which is why each carries a rationale tying it back.

Once you have approved a plan, its win condition is fixed for that day. You can still refine the plan itself by talking to the agent, but you cannot rewrite what the day was for after the fact, for the same reason status is not a field you can drag: a win condition you can edit at 5pm is one that is always met.

There is one live plan per mission per day. Rejecting a proposed plan discards it, and tasks you already approved from it stay: they are your work now, not the plan's.

Mission updates¶

The updates on a mission are its narrative history: short status notes, written each morning, each carrying a health verdict and the target updates written with it.

Read as a sequence, they answer the question a status meeting exists to answer. Not "what did we do", which is what the tasks list already tells you, but "is this working". A mission that has been at risk for nine days in a row is a mission whose strategy is wrong, and you can see that in the sequence long before you can see it in the target.

You can write one yourself whenever you have something the agent could not observe.

When a mission ends¶

Set it to completed. Nothing is deleted, the tasks and outputs stay where they are, and the mission stops consuming a slot in tomorrow's planning.

Deleting a mission is a different act, and it keeps your work: its tasks and their outputs survive, detached from the mission. You lose the frame, not the deliverables.