Glossary

Short meanings for the words you'll see in our planning guides. For the full process, read How we plan and track work: a tutorial.

• Record: the one text file for a project or initiative. It says what the work is, who owns it, and where it stands.
• Initiative: an area of work that goes on for a long time, with no end date. Example: Media House.
• Project: a piece of work with a clear outcome and an end. Example: the Global Connection Call.
• Task: one small thing to do. Tasks live on a board.
• Board: the place where tasks are kept: Asana or Beads.
• Pointer: a short note that points to something kept elsewhere, instead of copying it.
• Team plan: a note, written every week or two, of what the team agreed to focus on.
• Sweep: your AI reading the records and boards to list what is in progress, open, stale or without an owner.
• Owner: the person who confirms the facts in a record. Editing a file doesn't make you the owner.
• Repository (repo): a shared folder of files on GitHub, with its full history of changes.
• Git: the tool that keeps that history of changes.
• GitHub: the website that hosts our repositories and our accounts.
• Beads (bd): the task tracker your AI reads and writes for you. You rarely type its commands yourself.
• Asana: the task tool the Media House team uses.
• Skill: a written set of instructions your AI follows for a job, such as the planning skill.
• Session: one conversation with your AI about one task.
• Markdown: plain text with light formatting, such as # for a heading. Our records are Markdown files.
• Clone: make a copy of a repository on your own computer.
• SSH key: a secret file on your computer that proves to GitHub who you are, so you don't need to type a password each time.
• Organisation (life-itself): the GitHub group that holds all our repositories. You must be added to it.