Project overview

The project’s front page: an advisor observation, what you have built, what happened lately, and the facts.

Overview is where a project opens, and it reads in one pass from top to bottom: the masthead tells you what the project is, the advisor says one thing about where it stands, tiles count what you have built, a short stream shows what happened lately, and a strip at the bottom holds the reference facts. You will not find a health score, a completion percentage, a progress bar or a tasks-remaining counter anywhere on it, because numbers like those reward motion, and confusing motion with thought is how people lose years on a dissertation. What you get instead is a specific reading of your own project as it stands today.

The masthead

The project’s name, and under it a line you should fill in with one sentence on what this project is for.

Leave it empty and the page asks for it, saying “Add a one-line framing so the advisor - and your future self - knows what this project is for.” Both halves of that hold, since your advisor reads the line at the start of every session, and you will read it in eighteen months, having completely forgotten what you meant in month three.

You can also set a project type (“Dissertation”) and a year, both edited in place, while a brand-new project reads as “Your new project” and asks you to name and frame it, with everything below filling in as you work.

The advisor’s observation

One gold card holding the most recent thing your advisor has said about this project, with More to expand it and Open the conversation → to take it further.

Two things you can do with an observation: Save puts it in your Journal as a starred entry, which is how the ones that turn out to matter survive, and Dismiss clears it. Get into the habit of saving, because an observation you agreed with in March is evidence about how your own thinking moved, and once it scrolls away it is gone.

On a project with nothing in it the card admits it has nothing to read and suggests that two or three of the papers you are already working from would fix that. If the advisor is switched off for this project, the card says so and points out that the counts, events and facts below belong to you either way, since nothing else on this page needs AI.

What you’ve built

Five tiles: Sources, Notes, Questions, Models, References. Each shows a count with a subline, and each links into the matching Desk tab.

The sublines carry what a bare number cannot:

• Sources: how many arrived this week, or “import to start”.
• Notes: when you last wrote one.
• Questions: either “all clearly framed” or “{n} needs sharpening”.
• Models: how many you have built.
• References: how many sources the bibliography draws on.

“Needs sharpening” is the only judgement on the page, so it is worth saying what triggers it: a question gets flagged when it has no design-alignment score yet, or when its weakest dimension falls below the midpoint, across research, sampling, measurement and analytic design. You get a count and a next move rather than a grade, and Questions covers what the scoring looks at.

On an empty project the section says the quiet part out loud: “Nothing here is busywork - each tile is a place real work accumulates. Sources are the usual first move.”

Lately

A short reverse-chronological stream of sources added, notes written, models built, advisor observations, milestones and events, with every entry labelled by kind and timed loosely as “this morning” or “Tuesday”.

Treat it as a window rather than the record, since Full journal → opens the Journal, which holds everything, filters and exports.

Project facts

The reference strip at the bottom holds the things that rarely change and matter when they do. It is marked “Reference · edit anytime”, and every field edits in place.

• Status. Where the project sits in the doctoral arc, from eight values: Coursework, Proposal, Candidacy, Data collection, Analysis, Writing, Revision, Defense. Your advisor reasons about this one, so keeping it current changes what comes back.
• Next deadline. A date and label you set, or, if you leave it blank, the next event on your timeline, and it tells you which one it is using.
• Working toward. The output you are aiming at, such as “Empirical paper”.
• Designs. How you are going about it.
• Keywords. The project’s own terms, which feed the analyses in Terms.
• Funding. Linked grants, though most projects need nothing here and the section says as much instead of implying you forgot something.

How to actually use this page

Open it at the start of a session and read down, letting the advisor card tell you what something that has read your project thinks deserves attention, the tiles show where the work is thin, and Lately remind you what past-you was doing. Then leave for the Desk, the Map or the Advisor with a reason for going there.

You do not work on this page so much as decide what to work on.

Next: Sources, or The Advisor.