The project brief that fits in five bullets
Look at your project list and pick one that has been open for a while. Now answer three questions about it: what does done look like, who decides, and what happens if it does not happen at all.
If any answer takes more than a sentence, that project is not stalled by execution. It was never defined, and no amount of next actions will fix a project whose finish line nobody drew.
Five bullets, four minutes
Write these under the project bullet, before the first task:
- Done looks like. One sentence, in the past tense, that somebody else
could verify. "The pricing page is live with two plans and a working checkout", not "pricing sorted".
- Not doing. The two or three things people will assume are included.
This is the most valuable line and the one nobody writes.
- Who decides. For a personal project this is usually you, and writing
it still helps: it tells you which decisions you are waiting for somebody else on, and those are the ones that quietly stall everything.
- The first real step. Not "plan the project". The first thing that
changes something.
- If this does not happen. One line. Half of what is on your list turns
out to have a comfortable answer here, and those projects should be in Someday rather than pretending to be active.
The line that saves the most time
"Not doing" is the one to force. Scope does not creep during a project because of weak discipline; it creeps because the boundary was never written, so every new idea sounds like it was always part of the plan.
A written boundary turns the addition into a decision ("that is not in this, do we change it?") instead of an assumption. Most of the time the honest answer is no, which you would never have said out loud without the line.
Where it lives
Under the project, above the tasks, and it stays there while the work happens. A brief in a separate document is a brief nobody rereads, and the whole value of the "not doing" line is being read in week three, when somebody suggests the obvious extra thing.
Because it is bullets rather than a document, it can be edited when reality changes, with the change visible. A brief that was quietly rewritten is worth nothing; one that shows the scope moved on the fourteenth is a record you can learn from at the post-mortem.
The agent's use for it
This is the single most useful thing to hand an agent alongside a task. "Done looks like" plus "not doing" is a better specification than most prompts, and an agent that reads them stops proposing the helpful extra work that you already decided against.
Four minutes, now
Open the template, press "Show in my Pando", then take the oldest project on your list and write the five bullets. Two things usually happen: one project gets noticeably easier, and one turns out to belong in Someday. Both are worth four minutes.