Overview

Intro

Jupiter is a tool for life planning. It is opinionated in how it approaches this problem. The goal of this page is to document Jupiter's conceptual model and how life planning is mapped to it.

There will be references made to the current implementation. But the concepts are separate from it, and could just as easily be implemented via pen & paper.

The Concepts

As a quick reference, here is the list of the more important concepts:

  • Workspace: the place where all the work in Jupiter happens.
  • Task: an atomic unit of work. This is normally something like "Congratulate Jeff on the speech", or "Buy new socks".
  • Habit: a regular activity, usually one that is centered on you. Think "Walk 10K steps" or "Meditate for 5 minutes". A habit will generate a task periodically which needs to be acted upon.
  • Chore: a regular activity, usually one that is imposed by the outside world. Think "Pay mortgage" or "Take car in for checks". A chore will generate a task periodically which needs to be acted upon.
  • Big plan: a larger unit of work, consisting of multiple tasks. This is normally something like "Plan a family vacation", or "Get a talk accepted to a conference".
  • Project: a larger and longer-term container for work. This is normally a neatly defined part such as "Personal" goals or "Career" goals, etc.
  • Smart list: a list of things! It can record books to read, visited restaurants, movies to watch, etc.
  • Metric: a measure of the evolution in time of some aspect of your life. Think weight, days gone to the gym, or marathons ran!
  • Person: a family member, friend, acquaintance, etc you wish to keep in touch with, or otherwise know about in a more formal way.

The rest of the document will cover each of these in greater detail.

Note: When referencing Jupiter commands, we’ll use jupiter foo instead of the current Docker based docker run -it --rm --name jupiter-app -v $(pwd):/data jupiter foo. We’ll get there sometime too, but for the sake of brevity it’s easier this way.

As a general consideration, every action in Jupiter is done via a command in the jupiter CLI app. It will affect both the local storage and Notion at the same time. You can edit things in Notion, and for most things it will be easier to go this route though. So you'll need to run special sync commands to keep the local store and Notion in sync.