Guidance

Guidance is Altair’s answer to “what am I working on, and what am I supposed to be doing right now?” — without turning you into a productivity case study.

The domain exists because the biggest friction point for ADHD brains isn’t deciding what matters. It’s holding onto that decision long enough to act on it the next day. Guidance is a structure for keeping those decisions visible without demanding constant attention.

The shape of the domain

Guidance has five concepts, and they nest:

Initiatives — the biggest thing. A multi-month effort. “Move house,” “ship the side project,” “finish the degree.”
Epics — a chunk of an initiative. “Pack the kitchen,” “build the auth module,” “write the thesis intro.”
Quests — one discrete thing you can do. “Box up the spice rack,” “write login form,” “draft thesis abstract.”
Routines — a recurring pattern that spawns quests. “Morning pages,” “weekly review,” “water the plants.”
Focus sessions — a bounded window of time during which you are working on something specific. Has a start, an end, and a thing it was about.

And one smaller concept that ties them together:

Daily check-ins — a short log at the end of a day. What happened, what didn’t, how you feel about tomorrow.

How the pieces fit

The hierarchy is deliberately shallow. Initiatives hold epics. Epics hold quests. That’s the entire tree.

Routines sit to the side. A routine does not itself get completed — it generates quests on its schedule, and those quests get completed.

Focus sessions and check-ins are observational. They record what actually happened, rather than defining what should happen.

Working with initiatives

An initiative is the container you reach for when you catch yourself saying “I want to do X” about something that will take weeks or months. It has a title, a description, and a status.

Initiatives do not have deadlines by default. You can add one if it helps; most of the time it doesn’t. What matters more is whether the initiative is currently active, on hold, or done.

A common mistake is creating too many initiatives. Aim for fewer than you think you need — three or four that are active at once is a lot.

Working with epics

Epics break an initiative into chunks you can reason about in a sitting. They inherit the initiative’s context, but they are the level at which you start planning actual work.

A good epic is something you could describe the shape of in one breath — “the part of the move where we pack the kitchen,” “the part of the auth module that handles password reset.”

If an epic’s scope is growing every time you look at it, that’s a signal to split it or to promote the whole thing to an initiative.

Working with quests

Quests are the unit of work Altair pushes into your day. Each quest is a thing you can finish. If you can’t finish it, it’s too big to be a quest — break it in half.

Quests have:

A title — the thing to do.
A status — not_started, in_progress, completed, deferred, or cancelled.
An optional parent epic — if it belongs to something bigger.
Optional links — to notes, inventory items, other quests.

A quest without a parent is fine. Sometimes a thing just needs to get done and doesn’t belong to a larger arc.

Working with routines

Routines are the thing that stops you from forgetting the recurring maintenance of a life. Watering plants, taking out bins, backing up your laptop, calling your mother.

A routine has:

A title — the recurring thing.
A schedule — daily, weekly (specific days of the week), or interval (every N days).

When a routine’s schedule fires, Altair creates a new quest using the routine’s title. The routine itself keeps going. You only ever complete the individual quests.

The important thing about routines in Altair: they do not nag. If you miss one, the spawned quest stays there until you complete or dismiss it. The next run creates a new quest regardless. You decide how much history to carry forward.

Focus sessions

A focus session is a bounded window of work. You start it, you pick what it’s about (usually a quest, sometimes just a free-form topic), and you stop it when you’re done or when your attention has left the room.

Focus sessions aren’t a commitment. They are a log. The value is in looking back at a week and seeing honestly how much time went to what — without having to reconstruct it from memory.

Altair doesn’t block notifications or dim the screen during focus sessions. That’s the operating system’s job. The app stays out of your way.

Daily check-ins

At the end of a day, you can leave a short check-in. How was the day. What got done. What didn’t. How you’re feeling about tomorrow.

Check-ins are free-form text and take thirty seconds. They are the single most useful feature for the third week of a rough patch — when everything feels like it’s been the same bad day for a fortnight, a check-in from ten days ago is evidence that things actually do change.

Common workflows

Starting a new initiative

Create the initiative. A one-sentence description is enough for the first pass.
Create the two or three epics that break it into recognizable chunks. Don’t try to anticipate every epic.
Create the first few quests under the first epic. Start.

New epics and quests can always be added later. The initiative doesn’t need a full plan before you begin.

Running a week

At the start of the week, look at your active initiatives and pick the epic you’re working on. During the week, pull quests off that epic as you have capacity. At the end of the week, a quick check-in is enough to orient the next one.

Handling a dropped routine

Sometimes life eats a routine for a month. When you pick it back up, don’t try to rebuild the backlog. Just delete the stale quests, let the schedule spawn the next one, and carry on. The history is already in the database if you need it later.

Linking across domains

A quest can be linked to a note in Knowledge (for a reference you’ll need while doing it) or to an inventory item in Tracking (for something you need to have on hand). The links are bidirectional — you can find the quest from the note, and the note from the quest.

This is where Altair starts to be more than three apps bundled together. The project is the graph.