How the plan fits together

Plan is a full workspace view — open it from the Plan button in the left rail, under To Dos. It answers one question: what are we trying to reach, what work gets us there, and when.

Three levels

A plan in Crux is a hierarchy, and each level answers a different question.

Activities sit under milestones; to-dos sit under activities. None of the nesting is compulsory — an activity with no milestone appears under Not in a milestone, and a to-do with no activity is still a project to-do. The hierarchy is there when you want structure, not a form you have to fill in.

Five views over the same plan

The tab strip at the top of Plan switches between five views of exactly the same data. Edit in any of them and the others follow.

• Overview — the whole plan as an outline: every milestone, the activities beneath it, and the to-dos beneath those. This is the fastest place to add items and re-sequence them.
• Board — every to-do as a card in a status lane, dragged between lanes as work moves.
• Calendar — a month grid, with milestones, activities, and to-dos as chips on their day.
• Timeline — a gantt view, with activities nested under their milestone and to-dos under their activity.
• People — the project's people directory: your team, external contacts, and personas.

Calendar and Timeline share a header for moving through time and narrowing what you see — see Plan: calendar & timeline. Overview and Board read the whole plan, so they have no period controls.

Starting from Overview

Overview opens with the Agent composer at the top: describe what you are trying to accomplish and it drafts the plan from your own research, rather than leaving you to fill an empty outline. See Plan with the Agent.

Under it, a row of cards summarises the plan and doubles as navigation — open to-dos on the Board, days remaining on the Calendar, milestone count on the Timeline, and people on People. Click one to jump to that tab.

Below that is the outline itself. Activities start collapsed so the page reads at outcome level first, and each row carries what you need inline:

• Add a milestone, an activity under it, or a to-do under that.
• Move earlier and Move later to re-sequence milestones.
• On a to-do row: Run with Agent, Schedule & assign, Labels, mark it done, or delete it.

Opening a to-do

Click a to-do anywhere in the plan and it opens in the detail pane, where the title, the done state, the schedule, the owners, the labels, and the activities it belongs to are all editable in one place. Use with Agent starts a conversation with the to-do as context, and the overflow menu carries favourite, history, and delete.

Priority and status

Milestones and activities carry the same two fields, so you can read progress consistently across the plan.

• Priority — Urgent, High, Medium, or Low. New items start at Medium.
• Status — Backlog, Todo, In Progress, In Review, Done, Cancelled, or Duplicate. New items start at Todo.

Setting an activity's status to Done ticks it complete, and marking it complete sets the status — the two never disagree. The same vocabulary drives the Board lanes, and research and experience items carry the same Status, Priority, Schedule, and People fields on their own detail panes — so a piece of evidence can be tracked like the work it belongs to.

An activity is a job

An activity can also declare what it should leave behind — a journey, a themes table, the pages it changes. Each of its to-dos is an action, and the deliverables expected from that action sit beneath it, so the activity reads as a job rather than a bag of links. An n/m count on its Overview row shows how much of that work has actually produced something. Completion stays manual: mark an activity done with deliverables still outstanding and Crux warns you rather than stopping you.

Assign research to the plan

The point of planning inside Crux, rather than in a separate tracker, is that the evidence is already here. Open any research item and click Assign to attach it to an activity or a milestone.

The dialog has two modes:

• Existing — search your activities and milestones, each shown with its status and priority. Anything the item is already assigned to appears as a chip at the top.
• Create new — switch between Activity and Milestone, give it a title, schedule, priority, status, and people, then Create & assign.

Assigned items show up on the activity's Linked tab, so the interview notes, the usability findings, and the competitor table that justify a piece of work sit with it rather than three clicks away.

Reading the plan from Research

When Research is the active view, the sidebar carries collapsible Milestones and Activities sections. Select one and Research filters to the items tagged to it — a direct route from "this milestone" to "the evidence behind it". The research list itself can also be filtered by Status, Priority, and date range, and those choices are remembered — see Filtering, sorting, and favourites.

Next

Continue the guide with Milestones.