Lific
Concepts

Plans

Project plans, nested steps, issue mirroring, and anchor issues.

A plan is a project-scoped tree of steps. Plans keep hierarchy separate from issues, which remain flat work items.

Identifiers and statuses

Plans use identifiers in the form PROJECT-PLAN-SEQUENCE. For example, the second plan in project LIF is LIF-PLAN-2.

Each plan has one of these statuses.

StatusDescription
activeThe default plan status.
doneA completed plan status.
archivedAn archived plan status.

Plan listings include the total step count and the count of completed steps.

Nested steps

A plan has root steps and child steps. Steps can be nested to any depth.

Each step has a title, description, completion state, sibling position, and optional linked issue. Steps can be moved, reordered, reparented, or deleted. Deleting a step also deletes its child subtree.

Issue mirroring

A step can link to an issue. The link provides one-way and issue-driven completion behavior.

  • Marking a linked step done marks its linked issue done when the issue is not already done.
  • Marking a linked issue done marks every step that references it done in active plans.
  • Changing a linked issue from done to another status reopens its referencing steps in active plans.
  • Reopening a step does not reopen its linked issue.

Issue-driven step updates apply only to active plans. Done and archived plans do not receive these cascades.

When an issue reopens a plan step, Lific records the time of that issue-driven reopening on the step.

Anchor issues

A plan can have an optional anchor issue. The anchor identifies the issue that the plan decomposes.

When an anchor issue changes to done, its active plan is archived. Marking a plan done does not change the anchor issue.

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