Goals
Goals are your biggest ambitions - the kind of thing that takes weeks or months. Each goal has a time horizon, a desired outcome, and (optionally) a tree of sub-goals, linked tasks, habits, and infocards. Premade goals also end with a dungeon.
What Makes Something a Goal
A goal in Scope is a multi-step journey, not a single action. Where tasks are "get this done" and habits are "keep doing this," goals are "reach this destination."
Examples:
- "Run my first 5k by June."
- "Build a meditation practice over the next three months."
- "Ship the side project this quarter."
Goals anchor to a time period - week, month, quarter, or year - and often decompose into smaller sub-goals that represent milestones along the way.
Custom Goals vs Premade Goals
Scope has two goal types:
| Custom Goals | Premade Goals | |
|---|---|---|
| Built by | You | The Scope team |
| Structure | Whatever you design | Sequential tree of sub-goals |
| Tasks / infocards | You create them | Shipped with the template |
| Required habits | None | Specified by the template |
| Completion reward | None (by design) | XP + gold |
| Unlocks a dungeon | No | Yes (for most templates) |
Custom goals let you design the objective, timeline, and milestones yourself. Premade goals are curated journeys - the Scope team has authored the structure, picked the habits, written the infocards, and designed a dungeon to cap the end.
Goal Hierarchy and Sub-Goals
Bigger goals break into smaller ones. A year-long goal might decompose into quarterly sub-goals, each of which might decompose further into monthly milestones. See Sub-Goals & Milestones for how the tree works.
Goals Become Dungeons
For premade goals, the real payoff is the dungeon that unlocks when you finish the goal. The dungeon requires you to have adopted specific habits along the way - those habits' soldiers are the party you take in.
This is the tightest coupling in the whole app: your real-life work on the goal becomes the party that fights the in-game boss.
Custom goals don't have dungeons - they're too varied to hand-author combat content for. The completion is the reward.
Why Custom Goals Don't Grant XP
The design choice
Custom goals don't grant XP or gold on completion. You get to define what "done" means - including whether to log the goal as complete at all - and any reward would be too easy to exploit. Premade goals are curated by the Scope team with defined scope, so their rewards are anchored to verifiable completion. The split preserves the leaderboard's meaning: XP reflects things the system can trust, not self-declared wins.