Goal tracking
Goals that decompose into something you can do today
A goal you cannot act on this afternoon is a wish with a deadline. The point of this page is the decomposition.
What is Crescendo as a goal tracker?
Crescendo is a goal tracker that connects long-term goals to the daily habits that advance them. You define a goal, break it into milestones, and attach habits to it; progress is then computed from the habits you actually logged rather than from a completion percentage you set by hand.
How goal tracking works here
A goal holds milestones, and milestones are where a long horizon becomes tractable. "Run a half marathon" is not actionable; "run 10km without stopping by the end of March" is, and it is checkable, which is the property that matters.
Habits attach to goals. That link is what stops the two halves of the product being separate apps sharing a login: the daily tick is not just a tick, it is the increment on something you said you wanted.
Progress is derived. Self-reported completion percentages drift upward over time regardless of what happened, because the person filling them in is the same person who wants the number to be high.
Why most goals fail, and what this changes
Goals usually fail for one of two reasons: they were never decomposed into a next action, or the system tracking them stopped being opened. The milestone structure addresses the first. The forgiving streak weighting addresses the second, by removing the failure state that makes people stop looking.
Neither is a motivation trick. A goal you have not attached a habit to is simply a goal nothing is currently moving, and the app is willing to show you that.
Who this is for
People with goals on a horizon long enough that daily progress is invisible — a qualification, a body of work, a change in health that takes a year. Short, single-step goals do not need this and are better served by a task list.
How this differs from a to-do list
A to-do list is a set of things that are finished when they are done. A goal tracker is a set of things that are advanced by repetition and are never done on a given Tuesday. Trying to run the second on the first is why long-term goals sink to the bottom of task apps and stay there.
At a glance
- Structure
- Goal → milestones → attached habits
- Progress source
- Logged habit completions
- Self-reported percentages
- Not used
- Horizon
- Built for months, not days
Common questions
- How do I break a large goal into milestones?
- Work backwards from the goal to the last checkable state before it, then repeat. A good milestone is one where you could not argue about whether it had been reached. If a milestone needs a judgement call, it is usually still too large.
- How is progress calculated?
- From the habits you logged against the goal and the milestones you have reached. There is no field for setting a completion percentage yourself, because self-reported progress reliably drifts upward independently of what actually happened.
- Can a habit belong to more than one goal?
- Yes. Habits like sleep or exercise legitimately advance several goals at once, and forcing a one-to-one link would mean either duplicating the habit or under-counting it.
- What happens when I miss a milestone deadline?
- The milestone stays open and the goal keeps its history. Nothing is deleted or marked failed — a missed date is information about the estimate, and the usual correct response is to re-cut the milestone rather than to abandon the goal.
- Is this separate from the habit tracker?
- No, it is the same product. Goals and habits are linked deliberately: the daily habit tick is the mechanism by which a goal moves, and separating them is what makes long-term goals invisible in most tools.