How We Plan and Track Work: A Tutorial

Read it once, set up your computer, then ask your AI what's yours this week.

Purpose of this guide

This guide is for Life Itself team members (and your AI) to get up to speed on our new planning system at Life Itself. We are currently running a pilot to plan and track work across the team, with the aim of using AI to increase transparency and efficiency. You don't need technical skills to follow it. If a word is new, see the glossary.

How work is planned and tracked

Watch the two-minute explainer first:

What you need to install

You need three things:

Accounts and the Claude app. Follow the Tao prerequisites: a GitHub account, joining the life-itself organisation, and the Claude desktop app, signed in with your Life Itself email. Open the Code tab in Claude; that's where we work.
Your computer. Follow Set up your computer (with AI) in Tao. Paste its prompt into the Code tab, and Claude installs Git, the GitHub CLI, Beads and the planning repository for you.
Beads, if Claude can't install it. Follow Install Beads by hand. To learn how we use it day to day, read the Beads guide.

Check it worked. Ask Claude: "Show me my Beads, and the first five open tasks in planning." You should see a list of tasks, one per line, like this:

○ lip-42k.2.4 P3 Migrate Substack newsletters to our own newsletter infrastructure

Read each line from left to right:

The first part, lip-42k.2.4, is the task ID.
P3 is its priority.
The rest is the title.

Tip: you can also ask Claude for the details stored on a task, such as its description and notes. For example: "Show me the details of lip-42k.2.4." Claude shows something like this:

lip-42k.2.4 · Migrate Substack newsletters to our own newsletter infrastructure   [P3 · OPEN]
Created by: Rufus Pollock · Type: task
Created: 2026-09-30 · Updated: 2026-10-05

DESCRIPTION
  Longer-term: move newsletter distribution off Substack into our own
  newsletter infrastructure, integrated with podcast publishing.

NOTES
  2026-10-05: absorbed into comms infrastructure project 2612.

Stuck? Paste the error into Claude and ask what went wrong. If it still doesn't work, message Asdra.

What to record when you work on a project

We track work at three levels. Knowing which is which tells you where to write things down.

	What it is	Example	Has an end?
Initiative	An area of work that goes on for a long time	Media House, Calls and Catalysts	No
Project	A piece of work with a clear outcome	The Global Connection Call: six community calls	Yes
Task	One small thing to do	"Book the venue"	When done

Initiatives can sit inside each other. Small tasks don't need a project; log them as a bead (a Beads task) instead.

Every project has one record. A record is a short text file in the project's folder. It says what the work is and what finished looks like (done_when), who owns it, its status (in-progress means active now, next means chosen to start soon), its parent initiative (parent), where its tasks are (tracker: Beads or Asana), and dated status_notes. Example:

owner:         petronella
status:        next
parent:        calls-and-catalysts
done_when:     first call 29 Oct; the series of six runs to 3 Dec
tracker:       beads
status_notes:  dated lines: what changed, who said so

How to log an update:

Tell your AI what changed, for example: "Log an update on the Global Connection Call: the venue is confirmed."
Ask it to add a dated line to the status notes, saying what changed and how we know.
To pause or close a project, ask it to change the status and add a dated note with the reason. Keep the record.

How to log a task: Ask your AI to check whether the task already exists before creating a new one. Every task must have an owner, a context and a priority. In Beads, priorities range from P0 (critical) to P4 (backlog). Initiatives have a separate one-to-four-star priority rating, set centrally by Uriel and Rufus.

Prompts you can use. Change the parts in brackets:

"Check whether we already have a task for [topic] before you create one. If not, create it under [project name]."
"What's the status of [project name], and who owns it?"
"I've finished [task]. Close it and say why."
"Which projects in [initiative] have no owner?"

How to plan your day with AI

Each morning, open Claude in the planning folder and paste this prompt:

Use the planning skill. Run the sweep for me and show what's mine today: in progress first, then open, each with its priority and a link to its source.

Claude knows who you are from your setup, so you don't need to give your ID. It reads the records and boards and lists your work, each item linked to where it came from.

1. Paste the planning prompt
        │
2. Claude reads the records, boards and team plan
        │
3. You get your list, each item linked to its source

Two habits make this work well:

Tell your AI when something is wrong. For example: "This task is done, close it and say why."
Update at the end of the day. Ask your AI what changed before you finish.

Requests for Media House

Status: open. We have not decided how requests for Media House will work, and where the request inbox lives is still being agreed.

Until the inbox is set up, send requests to Uriel. Include what is being promoted and who is asking, a short brief, the key dates, the platforms, links and files, and who signs it off. Don't add tasks to Asana yourself. Only the Media House team works in Asana.