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Goals & Progress Tracker

The Goals tracker is a lightweight system for setting writing and worldbuilding objectives and watching your progress over time. It's built around three levels: Goals, Milestones, and Tasks.

Goals​

A goal is the top-level objective. It might be broad — "Flesh out the Thornwood Region" or "Write all key NPCs before the next campaign arc" — but it gives everything underneath it a clear purpose.

When creating a goal you can set:

  • Title
  • Description — a bit more detail about what the goal involves
  • Colour — a colour that carries through to all the milestones and progress bars underneath it
  • Archive — goals can be archived when finished rather than deleted, so you keep a record of what you've accomplished

Milestones​

Milestones break a goal into stages. Each milestone represents a meaningful chunk of work. For example, a goal of "Complete the northern continent worldbuilding" might have milestones like "All major cities written", "Pantheon documented", and "Timeline of the founding wars".

Each milestone can optionally have:

  • Due date — if you want to hold yourself to a schedule
  • Word count target — Loreden tracks the total words written in linked worldbuilding entries and shows your progress against the target

Milestones have their own progress bars based on the tasks beneath them.

Tasks​

Tasks are the individual items of work inside a milestone. Each task has:

  • Title — what specifically needs to be done
  • Status — cycles through To-Do → In Progress → Done
  • Due date — optional, for time-sensitive items
  • Worldbuilding entry link — link the task to a specific worldbuilding entry, so you can jump straight from the goal tracker to the article you're working on

The milestone and goal progress bars update automatically as you move tasks to Done.

Tracking your progress​

The main Goals page shows all your active goals with an overall progress bar for each one. Inside a goal, each milestone shows its own progress bar. This makes it easy to see at a glance where you're making headway and where work is still waiting.

Tips for getting the most out of Goals​

  • Keep goals broad and milestones specific — a goal of "NPCs" is too vague; a milestone of "Write the five council members" is actionable
  • Link every task to a worldbuilding entry as soon as you know which article it relates to — it saves time hunting later
  • Use the archive feature rather than deleting completed goals; it's satisfying to look back at what you've built