Goals and Check-ins
Set personal goals, record lightweight progress check-ins, and build the evidence trail that feeds your next review.
Why It Matters
The worst part of review season is reconstructing six months of work from memory — recency bias wins and Q1’s biggest ship gets forgotten. Goals with check-ins fix this at the cost of thirty seconds a week: each check-in is a dated breadcrumb of progress that’s sitting there waiting when the review cycle opens.
In Kit, goals aren’t a separate OKR ceremony — they’re deliberately lightweight and they feed directly into AI-drafted reviews. The drafter reads your goals, their status, and your latest check-in notes as first-class evidence. A well-tended goal list is the difference between an AI draft that cites your actual year and one that has nothing to work with.
Setting Goals
Go to Performance > Goals. Each goal is a title (“Ship the billing revamp”), an optional description, and an optional due date — press Add goal and it’s live. Goals belong to you; this is a personal working surface, not a top-down assignment tree.
A goal moves through four statuses:
| Status | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Active | In progress — the default |
| Achieved | Done — say so, it’s review evidence |
| Missed | Didn’t land; the check-in trail preserves the why |
| Dropped | Deprioritized deliberately — distinct from missed |
Tip
Mark goals Missed or Dropped honestly instead of deleting them. A goal dropped because priorities shifted is a normal, defensible review narrative; a silently vanished goal is nothing. Removing a goal deletes its check-ins with it.
Goal descriptions and check-in notes are encrypted at rest, like all review content.
Progress Check-ins
Press Check in on any goal to record two things: a progress percentage (0–100) and a short note — the prompt is “What moved since last time?”. The goal’s displayed progress is simply the latest check-in’s value, and the latest note is what the AI drafter quotes.
Do and don’t:
| Do | Don’t |
|---|---|
| Check in when something moved — a ship, a milestone, a decision | Check in on a fixed schedule with “still going” |
| Name concrete artifacts (“migration ran clean in prod”) | Write vibes (“good progress this week”) |
| Keep 3–7 active goals | Track every task — that’s your issue tracker’s job |
| Update progress down when scope grew | Let a stale 80% imply something it doesn’t |
How Goals Feed Review Evidence
When a reviewer (or you, on a self-review) presses Draft with AI, the drafter gathers your most recent goals with their status, progress, and latest check-in note, alongside the previous evaluation, your role expectations, and your own notes. Goals give the draft its skeleton: which themes mattered this period and what actually shipped against them.
Goals are evidence, never metrics. Nothing in Kit scores you on goal counts or completion rates, no cross-employee goal comparison surface exists, and goal data appears in a review only through the drafter’s narrative — which a human reviewer then edits and owns.
Note
Goals are personal and continuous — they don’t belong to a cycle and don’t reset when one finalizes. Prune achieved and dropped goals at cycle boundaries so the list entering the next period reflects the next period.
Quick Checklist
- Add 3–7 goals in Performance > Goals that describe your next quarter
- Check in whenever something material moves — one sentence is enough
- Resolve each goal to Achieved / Missed / Dropped before your cycle’s due date
- On your self-review, pair goals with Your own notes for the work goals don’t capture
Next Steps
- AI-Drafted Reviews — see exactly how goal evidence appears in a draft
- Writing Reviews — the form your goal trail is preparing you for