Glossary

Focus lane

A commitment for a horizon, not a filter over everything you have.

Definition

A focus lane is a short, deliberately limited list of work a person has committed to within a chosen time horizon, pinned above everything else they could be doing. It differs from a filtered view or a priority field because membership is a decision rather than a sort order: something enters the lane only when a person puts it there, and the lane is meant to stay short.

Term type: Polaris usage
Horizons: Today, this week, next 30 days
Position: Pinned first in every view

The problem it exists to solve

Priority fields fail in a predictable way. Everything drifts upward, high stops meaning anything, and the sorted list is the full backlog in a different order. A person opening it still has to decide what to do, which is the decision the field was supposed to help with.

A focus lane makes the decision the act of adding. Putting something in the lane is a commitment, and the lane is short enough that adding a fourth item forces a look at the other three. The constraint is the feature.

How Polaris implements it

Three horizons
Today, this week, and the next thirty days. A person picks the horizon their work actually runs at, and the Focus screen shows that one.
Pinned first, everywhere
The focus lane appears at the top of every view rather than as a separate page you have to remember to open.
The home screen
Polaris opens on Focus rather than on a workstream list, because the first question of a working day is what am I committed to, not which projects exist.
A flag on the task
Focus membership is a property of the task, so an item stays itself when it enters or leaves the lane and keeps its workstream, its lane and its history.

Commonly confused with

Term	What it is	The difference
Priority field	A rank or level stored on every task	Sorts everything. A focus lane holds a small chosen subset.
Sprint backlog	Work a team commits to for an iteration	Team-level, fixed-length and ceremonial. A focus lane is personal and continuous.
Saved filter	A query over tasks matching criteria	Membership is computed. Focus membership is decided by a person.
Kanban WIP limit	A cap on items in progress in a column	Constrains flow through a board. A focus lane constrains attention across everything.

Workstream

A strand of work that keeps going, rather than a project that ends.

All-in-one workspace

One data model behind documents, tasks and conversation, instead of three products and a pile of integrations.

AI worker

The difference between an agent you prompt and an agent you assign work to.

A Todoist alternative for the point where a list becomes a team

Todoist is a superb personal task manager. Most people searching this are not looking for a better one.

A Linear alternative for the work Linear was never meant to hold

Linear is the best issue tracker most engineers have used. This page is not going to pretend otherwise.

What an AI worker actually does, department by department

Twelve functions, sixty recurring jobs, and the exact tool connection each one needs.

Questions people ask

+How is a focus lane different from marking tasks high priority?

Priority is a field on every task and drifts upward until it carries no information. A focus lane is a short list you add to deliberately, so its length is a signal in itself and a full lane is a prompt to finish something before starting more.

+How many items should be in a focus lane?

Few enough to hold in your head, which for most people is three to five for a day and slightly more for a week. If the lane needs scrolling it has stopped being a commitment and become a second backlog.

+Can AI workers have tasks in a focus lane?

Yes. Work assigned to an AI worker can sit in the focus lane like any other task, which is often how a person tracks a delivery they are waiting on and intend to review that day.