Concepts
How PacedMind organizes work into areas, projects and tasks, and how dependencies, activities, focus blocks, agent sessions and your preferences fit around them.
PacedMind organizes work in three levels: areas hold projects, and projects hold tasks. Dependencies order a project's tasks, the calendar adds fixed activities, the auto-planner suggests focus blocks, and agent sessions let Claude Code and Codex work on tasks. Your preferences tell agents how you like to work.
The building blocks
| Term | What it is |
|---|---|
| Area | A part of life or work, such as Work, Personal or Health. Each area has a color and a short key, like WRK, that task keys start with. |
| Project | A body of work inside one area, with a target date. A project can have a working folder and a default agent. |
| Task | One piece of work. It lives in a project, directly in an area, or in the Inbox when it has neither. Every task has a key, like WRK-12. |
| Sub-task | A checklist item inside a task. |
| Dependency | One task waiting for another in the same project. It orders the work; nothing starts by itself. |
| Activity | A fixed entry in the calendar, such as a meeting or a workout, one-off or weekly. |
| Focus block | Time the auto-planner suggests for one of your tasks, inside your work hours. Focus blocks are computed each time and never stored. |
| Agent session | Claude Code or Codex working on one task, in a terminal that PacedMind opened. |
| Preference | One line on how you like to work, under a topic, which agents follow when they plan your time and write tasks for you. |
How tasks are placed
- A task in a project also belongs to that project's area.
- A task can sit directly in an area, without a project.
- A task with neither is in the Inbox, ready to be sorted.
Each task has two independent dates: the due date (its deadline) and the planned date (the day to work on it). See Due and planned dates.
Each task also has someone who does it: you, Claude Code or Codex. Tasks that are yours never get an agent session and fill your own focus time; tasks for an agent can run as sessions. See Who does a task.
Reading the colors
PacedMind uses color for a small number of meanings:
- Area and project colors show what something belongs to: a task's calendar dot, a project's bar on the timeline, its ring in the sidebar. A project uses its own color, or its area's when it has none.
- Shades of gray show state: done work is faded, backlog outlines are dashed, running work is filled.
- Navy marks today and now, the current selection, the one main button of a dialog, and finished agent sessions that wait for review.
- Red marks what is overdue or behind schedule, errors, and actions that delete something.
Pages in this section
- Areas and projects: keys, colors, project settings, moving and deleting.
- Tasks: keys, statuses, priorities, labels, estimates, sub-tasks and dependencies.
- Due and planned dates: the difference, and how each view uses them.
- Who does a task: the Done by field and what it changes.
- How you work: your preferences, their topics, and what agents do with them.
- Calendar activities: fixed and weekly activities, and how to change them.
Where your data lives
The files PacedMind keeps on the computer, including the images in agents' reports, who can reach its server, and how to back up, move or reset the data.
Areas and projects
Create, rename, recolor, reorder, move, merge and delete areas and projects, select several at once, keep one project across your computers, give an area an icon or a picture of your own, and set a project's target date, folder, default agent and the project it starts after.