Work

Manage goals, tickets, heartbeats, and queue movement without turning receipts into the main UI.

Work is the execution surface. It answers: what is moving, what is blocked, and what needs to change in the queue?

The core model is:

Goals -- outcomes the team is trying to achieve
Tickets -- execution units attached to those outcomes
Heartbeats -- concise progress and risk updates that keep goals inspectable over time

Goals

Goals are the durable management object. They carry ownership, status, progress, and health over time. Goals are where operators look for portfolio movement, stale work, and missing momentum.

Use goals for:

multi-step outcomes
cross-ticket progress tracking
owner and health visibility
heartbeat summaries that explain trajectory, not just task churn

Tickets

Tickets are the queue object. They are what gets assigned, claimed, updated, commented on, and pushed through status transitions.

Use tickets for:

the concrete unit of execution
queue movement and prioritization
operator comments and follow-ups
triggering work to run now when the queue should not wait

Heartbeats

Heartbeats are how Work stays legible at a glance. They summarize progress and risk without forcing you to read every raw receipt.

A good heartbeat tells you:

what moved
what is blocked
what is likely next

If you need the exact evidence behind that summary, jump to Activity.

Work vs Activity

This distinction is important:

Work is the human operating surface for goals and tickets.
Activity is the backend receipt surface for work items, runs, tool calls, and deliveries.

Operators should spend most of their time in Work. They should use Activity when something needs proof, debugging, or audit detail.

About work items

Nitejar still uses work items internally as the receipt primitive created from incoming events. They are real and important, but they are not the main user-facing execution model anymore.

In practice:

manage goals and tickets in Work
inspect work-item timelines in Activity

Typical operator loop

Spot a problem in Command Center.
Open Work to inspect the goal or ticket.
Move status, assign work, post an update, or trigger a run.
Open Activity only if you need the exact run or delivery receipts.

Where to verify

Open Work for goals, tickets, and heartbeat-driven execution state. Open Activity when you need the underlying work-item and run receipts behind that state.