Goals feature lets you set long-term goals and objectives and provides a way for you to tie different actions (habits, projects, tasks) together to achieve a common purpose. You can also track your progress and reflect on your goals and actions regularly with the check-in functionality.

To turn on the strategy, go to ☰ → Strategies → Goals & Objectives and when you activate it, you will be asked how you want to access it.

When you open the Goals view, you will see the list of your active and pending goals, as well as the ones that are on the backburner. To create your first goal, click on the "Add Goal" button on the top right.

After you enter your goal's name, you get to choose the type of your goal. End goals are ones that have a measurable end or outcome like reaching a certain weight or revenue goal, or publishing a book while ongoing goals can be used for habits and actions that matter to you which work towards a larger outcome. Some examples of ongoing goals are being healthy, taking care of your mental health, being connected with friends & family, or self-improvement.

This option only shows up when you select an end goal. If you pick a deadline, Marvin will use it to tell you if you're on track. The deadline can always be changed if you need to give yourself more time.

Here you get to choose if you want to have this goal displayed in the Day View or not. Information that you enter in Category, Labels, and Priority options can be used for grouping your goals in the Goals view.

You can change all of these settings after you create a goal in case you change your mind about some of them.

This is an example of how goals will be displayed in the Day View:

The last step is to choose whether you want to send this goal to the backburner or to start it. Sending it to the backburner makes sense if you want to start working on this goal later on and don't want to worry about it now. If you choose to start it, the goal will be added as a pending goal, and only after you go through the goal setup will it become active.

Before you're able to start working on the goal you just created, you'll need to go through the following six steps:

Make sure this is a Goal you really care about and that the Goal is framed in a positive way: describe the end result you want rather than what you don't want anymore. (e.g. "Be a non-smoker" instead of "Quit smoking")

Click the "Add Tracker" button on the right if you want to track a specific metric related to this goal (e.g. revenue, muscle mass) or rate the state of this goal to keep track of how you are doing (e.g. rating your stress levels from 1-5). You can also add existing trackers by clicking on the "Add existing" button and this can be useful if you want to use one tracker in multiple goals.

To read more about the trackers, please check the Trackers article.

By clicking on the "Settings" icon on the top right, above "Goal Setup", you can optionally configure how you want to measure progress on this Goal (in percentage).

It can be a Tracker, a combination of Trackers, or by looking at your Task/Project completion percentage.

Think about what actions you need to take to achieve this Goal. Add them as Projects, Tasks, and Habits.

You can also tasks and projects to goals from the other views in Marvin. To do that, simply type the "##" shortcut in the task's title and you'll see the list of your goals:

Another way to do this is to add the "Set goal" action to your Right-click menu or Hover Button Actions.

Click the "Settings" icon on the top right to set expectations about how much work you want to do on this Goal each week.

Click the "Settings" icon on the top right and configure how often you want to check in on this Goal and add any custom question prompts to your Check-Ins.

You can set check-in to be each week, every 2 weeks or less often. Each time the check-in happens, you'll be asked a couple of questions on how you're doing and feeling about the goal and you can add additional questions that are important to you.

When there's a check-in to be done, you'll see a message in your Day View telling you "There are X Goal Check-in(s) today". After you open one, you will see something like this:

IMPORTANT: Check-ins are not stored in Marvin so if you wish to keep the track of them, you should either download them or send them as an email to someone. Once you click on the "Done" button you won't be able to see that check-in again.

The Goals' status is "pending" until you click the button below and fill out your Commitment Contract.

Here's an example of one:

By editing the Sidebar you can add the Goals dropdown to it which will give you an easy way to access tasks & projects that belong to each goal.

This will also filter the habits that are shown so that only ones that belong to the selected goal show up.

Tasks that are connected to a goal will have the heart icon. Once you hover over it, it will tell you to which goal the task is connected, and also display one of the motivations for working on this goal above the task.

Once you complete all items in a goal, you'll see the "All Done?" message on the right when you open that goal. Completed goals will be moved to the Archive which you can find on the top-left in the Goals view.