01What Vision is, and how to get around
Vision is built around a simple idea: everything you need to do lives in one of a few clear places, and each day you only look at what's actually relevant today. Tasks are organised into Areas (broad parts of your life, like Work or Home) which contain Projects, which contain individual tasks. Every task can be scheduled for a specific day (When) and separately given a Deadline if it truly has to be done by a date — these are treated differently on purpose, so your calendar of “things I've chosen to do today” doesn't get cluttered with “things that are merely due soon.”
On top of the task manager, Vision has two extra things bolted on: a time-tracking ledger (the clock pill at the top of the screen) and a sales tracking rail on the Today screen plus a dedicated Targets page, which pulls in your commission and attainment numbers so you don't have to leave your task list to check how the quarter is going.
The sidebar is your map: Today, Upcoming, Anytime and Logbook at the top, then your Areas, a Tags section, and a “Vision Ops” group for Targets and Weekly Review. Settings lives in a small button at the bottom of the sidebar — easy to miss, so it's worth remembering it's there. You can switch between Night and Stone display modes using the mark icon in the sidebar.
A few navigation basics: ⌘N starts a new task from anywhere, ⌘K opens search, and ⌘1 through ⌘4 jump straight to Today, Upcoming, Anytime and Logbook. Everything else — completing a task, starring it, or starting a 20-minute focus session on it — currently needs your mouse hovering over the row.
02Today — your daily home screen
Today is where you should start every day. From top to bottom: a time strip showing how your working day is filling up, a quick-entry box for typing in new tasks on the fly, your Top 3 — the tasks you've starred as the most important things to get done — then a Deadlines group for anything due soon, your other tasks grouped by area/project, and a Personal block at the bottom. On the right, an Ops rail gives you a running snapshot of your sales attainment and bonus numbers for the quarter.
Top 3 is meant to be your “mission orders” for the day — star up to three tasks and they get pulled into a prominent row at the top. A task that's both starred and has a deadline today can appear in two places at once, which is just a display quirk — completing it in either spot marks it done everywhere.
The Ops rail shows attainment, gap-to-target, time left in the quarter, and bonus figures. A few things worth knowing: the “weeks remaining” figure is a snapshot from whenever the data last refreshed, not a live countdown. There's currently no privacy-blur option on this screen, so bear in mind the rail shows real £ figures if you're about to share your screen.
- If you have fewer than three starred tasks, the Top 3 row can look a little sparse rather than resizing neatly — nothing's wrong, it's just designed for three.
- There's no “completed today” summary on this screen — once you tick something off, it disappears immediately. Check the Logbook if you want to see everything you finished today.
- Very late at night, tasks scheduled for “today” can be a beat slow to update — an app-restart or the next natural refresh sorts it out.
Tip
Treat the time strip's segments as a quick sanity check on your day, not a precise timesheet — use the Clock if you want an accurate log of where your hours went.
03Upcoming, Anytime, Logbook, and Areas & Projects
Upcoming shows what's scheduled over the next week day-by-day, then groups anything further out by month. Deadlines also show up here on their due date, even though the task itself “lives” on your Anytime or Today list. One thing to know: Upcoming only shows dates from today onward, so anything scheduled for a date that's already passed and never got moved won't appear here — worth occasionally checking Anytime for anything that's slipped through.
Anytime is your catch-all for tasks that don't have a specific day attached. Since Vision doesn't currently have a separate inbox, anything you quick-add without a date or project lands here too, mixed in with tasks you've deliberately parked for later — worth periodically skimming to file or schedule anything just sitting there unprocessed.
Logbook is your full history of completed tasks, most recent first. It's uncapped, so it can get long over time — there's no filter by area or project yet, so it's best used for “what did I get done recently” rather than searching far back.
Areas & Projects: each Area can contain Projects, and each Project contains its own tasks with a completion ring. A couple of things to know: there's currently no way to rename an area or project, add notes, or mark a project as complete from within the app. If you archive an area or project, it's removed from view but there's no visible way to restore it afterward — so archive with the assumption it's a one-way move for now.
04Quick Entry — typing tasks in shorthand
The quick-entry box (on Today, and anywhere you press ⌘N) understands a small shorthand language so you can type a task and its details in one go, with no menus. It's entirely local — no AI involved, just pattern matching — which means it's fast and predictable once you know the patterns.
- Dates: words like today, tomorrow, mon/monday, next wed, thursday week, or a specific date like 12 aug.
- Deadlines: prefix a date with by or deadline to set it as a deadline rather than a scheduled day.
- Starring: an asterisk * anywhere in the text stars the task for Top 3 and removes the asterisk from the title.
- Filing into a project or area: typing a project or area name followed by : or – at the start of the line files the task there.
- ! for priority-style marking is also supported.
A few things to know so you're not caught out: # files into an area, it doesn't add a tag — typing #admin puts the task in the Admin area, not a tag, even though tags are shown elsewhere as pill badges. Weekday words are picked up anywhere in the sentence — “Send Fri report” will schedule for Friday and shorten the title, which is handy when it's what you meant and surprising otherwise. A date that's already passed this year rolls forward to next year rather than being rejected. Times of day, recurring tasks and phrases like “in 2 weeks” aren't understood yet — stick to specific day/date words for now.
Tip
If quick entry files or schedules something incorrectly, it's quicker to fix it by opening the task and adjusting the fields directly than to retype the shorthand trying to dodge the pattern.
05The Clock, Focus Mode, and Weekly Review
The Clock is the pill at the top of the app, and it's genuinely one of the best-built parts of Vision. Click it to start logging time against a category or a specific task, switch between activities with one click, backdate a start time, or use “Log past time” to add minutes retroactively. It resumes correctly if you close and reopen the app while it's running. One small gap: you can't currently attach a note when you stop the clock, and “log past time” only offers today or yesterday as options.
Focus Mode is a deliberate full-screen takeover for a single task — press F on a hovered task and you get a clean timer with the task front and centre, plus a quick way to log time or mark it finished. There's no cancel button by design — it's meant to be a commitment. One thing worth knowing: if the app crashes mid-focus-session, that time isn't automatically reconciled into your log afterward — rare, but if it happens, just log the time manually via the Clock.
Weekly Review gives you a look back at the week: hours logged, “lost time” (hours in the working week not accounted for), and stats like tasks completed, deadlines hit, and tasks created, plus a note field for reflections.
Tip
If you open Weekly Review partway through the week, the “Lost Time” figure currently counts the rest of the week as if it should already have hours logged against it — so it will often look alarmingly high mid-week and settle down as the week goes on. It's most meaningful checked Friday afternoon or over the weekend, once the week is actually complete. The same applies to “deadlines missed.”
06Targets — the sales tracking rail and page
Targets is the dedicated page for your commission and attainment tracking — the fuller version of what the Ops rail shows on Today. It's organised top to bottom: headline hero figures, two scenario cards (committed vs. best-case), a chart of monthly performance, and four quarter cards with committed and best-case bonus figures.
If the underlying sales data file can't be read, Targets tells you honestly — you'll see a plain “Sales Data Offline” message rather than stale or fake numbers. There's a link at the bottom to open the full sales dashboard directly.
- Figures on this page and the Ops rail are pulled from the same file at different moments, so a slightly different “full year” percentage between the two is a timing quirk — trust the Targets page as the more complete view.
- The quarter cards' colour is based on simple thresholds rather than being fully dynamic, so a quarter right at a boundary might not shift colour the instant you'd expect.
- As with the Today rail, there's no privacy-blur on this page yet.
Tip
Targets is the better screen for a considered, end-of-week look at where the quarter stands; the Ops rail on Today is meant for a quick daily glance, not a full analysis.
07Keyboard shortcuts, and getting the most out of Vision
Shortcuts that work anywhere
- ⌘N — new task
- ⌘K — search
- ⌘1 / ⌘2 / ⌘3 / ⌘4 — jump to Today / Upcoming / Anytime / Logbook
- ⌘⇧T — open the clock picker
- ⌘↵ — save and open the full task editor from quick entry
Shortcuts that need your mouse hovering over a task row
- Space — complete the task
- S — star the task (adds it to Top 3)
- F — start a focus session on it
One quirk worth knowing: because these are hover-based, holding ⌘ while pressing S or F can accidentally star or focus whatever task your mouse happens to be sitting on. If a task ever gets starred or focused unexpectedly, that's almost certainly why.
General tips for getting the most out of Vision
- Use Top 3 deliberately, every morning. Pick three things, not ten.
- Let Anytime be your “someday” list, but skim it occasionally to file or schedule anything sitting there unprocessed.
- Do your Weekly Review on Friday afternoon or over the weekend, not mid-week.
- Lean on the Clock rather than the Today time strip for an accurate record of your time.
- Remember Settings is the small button at the bottom of the sidebar.
- Vision doesn't yet support repeating tasks — you'll need to re-add a recurring task after completing each instance for now.