Planning & Backlog Guide

How to use /plan and /backlog together to manage your projects effectively.

Overview

PARA Workspace provides two complementary tools for project management:

You don’t always need both. Use this guide to decide.

When to Use What

Rule of thumb: Every project needs a backlog. Only create a plan when you need phased architecture decisions.

Project Lifecycle

/new-project
     ↓
/plan create        (if needed — architecture, phases, schemas)
     ↓
/backlog add        (populate from plan phases)
     ↓
┌──────────── Daily Loop ────────────┐
│                                     │
│  /open   → context + current phase  │
│     ↓                               │
│  Pick tasks → Code → Test → Commit  │
│     ↓                               │
│  /backlog update → mark done        │
│     ↓                               │
│  /end    → log session + phase check│
│                                     │
└─────────────────────────────────────┘
     ↓
/retro → /archive   (when all phases complete)

How Plan & Backlog Connect

The plan defines phases (ordered by dependencies). The backlog tracks items (ordered by priority). They connect through a mapping table:

Plan                              Backlog
┌──────────────────┐              ┌──────────────────┐
│ Phase 0: Setup   │ ←──maps to──→ │ CI-01, CI-02     │
│ Phase 1: API     │ ←──maps to──→ │ CI-03, CI-04     │
│ Phase 2: Auth    │ ←──maps to──→ │ AU-01, AU-02     │
│ Phase 3: UI      │ ←──maps to──→ │ UI-01, UI-02     │
└──────────────────┘              └──────────────────┘

Plan tells you ORDER → "Do Phase 1 before Phase 2"
Backlog tells you STATUS → "CI-03 is ✅ Done, CI-04 is 🔨 In Progress"

The active_plan Field

When a plan exists, register it in project.md frontmatter:

---
goal: "My project goal"
status: "active"
active_plan: "plans/implementation-plan.md" # ← path relative to artifacts/
---

This enables /open and /end to automatically detect your current phase without scanning directories — saving agent tokens.

Cleanup: When the active plan is 100% complete, you can run /end [project] done to automatically remove this field and archive the plan.

Plan Archiving (v1.5.3)

When all phases reach 100%, /plan review automatically:

1. Moves the plan to artifacts/plans/done/[plan-name].md
2. Creates a completion review at artifacts/plans/done/[plan-name]-review.md
3. Removes active_plan from project.md
4. Suggests running /retro for a retrospective

Daily Session Flow

Step 1: Open (/open)

🚀 Starting: my-project | 📅 2026-02-26
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
📋 LAST SESSION: Completed API proxy setup
📐 CURRENT PHASE: Phase 2: Authentication     ← from plan
   Progress: 2/5 tasks done
   Next: AU-03 (Role permissions), AU-04 (Change password)
📥 BACKLOG: High: 3 | Medium: 4 | Low: 2
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
💡 SUGGESTED: Work on AU-03 (current phase, high priority)

The agent reads your plan (headers only — not the full document) to show which phase you’re in and what tasks are next.

Step 2: Work

Pick 2-3 tasks from the current phase. Code, test, commit.

Step 3: Update (/backlog update)

/backlog domain-pictures update
→ AU-03: ⏳ Pending → ✅ Done (2026-02-26)
→ AU-04: ⏳ Pending → 🔨 In Progress

Step 4: Close (/end)

/end domain-pictures
→ Session logged to sessions/2026-02-26.md
→ Plan Progress: Phase 2 — 4/5 tasks done
→ 🎉 Almost there! 1 task remaining in Phase 2.

When all tasks in a phase are done, the agent announces:

🎉 Phase 2 Complete! Phase 3: Dashboard UI ready to start.

Golden Rules

Syncing Plan & Backlog

Use /backlog sync to keep both artifacts aligned:

/backlog my-project sync

🔄 BACKLOG ↔ PLAN SYNC
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
| Phase   | Mapped | Missing |
| ------- | ------ | ------- |
| Phase 0 | 5/5    | 0       |
| Phase 1 | 4/6    | 2 ⚠️    |
| Phase 2 | 0/5    | 5 ⚠️    |
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

⚠️ 7 plan tasks not yet in backlog.
→ Auto-create backlog items? (y/n)

When to Sync

Workflow Commands Reference

Added in v1.4.2. Updated in v1.5.3 (Plan Archiving, /end done)

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