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Organize with categories

A category is the main structural home for an entry. Use one when a body of work needs its own planning rules, privacy boundary, visual identity, or AI context. In the demo workspace, Penguin Operations, Mission Control, Fish Diplomacy, and Human Maintenance separate genuinely different areas of the expedition.

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The list is searchable and shows task counts. Icons identify favorite, private, and inactive categories at a glance.
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Category settings containing Penguin Operations, Mission Control, Fish Diplomacy, and Human Maintenance with task counts and status icons

Create a category​

Narrated walkthrough: creating a category, setting its favorite/privacy options, and configuring its AI defaults.
  1. Open Settings → Categories.
  2. Select Create category.
  3. Enter a distinct name, color, and icon.
  4. Create it, then open the category again to configure its behavior.

Creation intentionally starts with the identifying fields. Planning, privacy, language, and automation options live on the full editor after the category exists.

Configure category behavior​

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Penguin Operations category editor showing its name, purple flight identity, and favorite, private, active, and day-planning options

The editor controls more than appearance:

  • Favorite makes an important category easier to recognize and select.
  • Private hides its content unless private entries are being shown. It is a visibility boundary, not separate encryption for the category itself.
  • Active controls whether the category can be selected for new entries. Deactivating it preserves existing data.
  • Day planning allows the category to participate in Daily OS planning.
  • Language provides the default language for new tasks in the category.

Use Day planning selectively. Enabling it for every category broadens the planner's context and makes the daily ritual noisier.

Add category-specific automation context​

A category can provide defaults for new tasks: an inference profile and an agent template. These are defaults, not permanent locks; task-level choices can still change later.

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Speech terms are separated with semicolons. Checklist corrections are learned from edits and can be reviewed or deleted here.
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Penguin Operations advanced settings with Project Waddle speech vocabulary and learned checklist corrections for Sir Flaps-a-Lot

The Speech recognition dictionary is useful for names, locations, acronyms, and domain vocabulary that transcription often misses. Penguin Operations, for example, teaches Lotti Project Waddle, Sir Flaps-a-Lot, sardine, and Europa.

When you manually correct generated checklist titles, Lotti can retain the before-and-after examples for future AI suggestions. Review the examples here and remove any correction that should not guide later output.

Categories versus labels​

Use a category for the primary home of work and a label for a cross-cutting property. Penguin Operations is a category; Habitat critical is a label that can also apply to Mission Control work.

Keep the category system small enough that choosing one is obvious. Add a new category when it changes planning, filtering, privacy, or automation—not merely because a new noun appeared.