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Project Status Convention Gap

2 min read

Project Status Convention Gap

Objective

Resolve the gap between the documented project status lifecycle (active | paused | completed | stale) and actual usage where some projects silently omit status to signal “not yet started / deferred.”

Context

README enumerates the canonical project statuses as active, paused, completed, stale. None of those cleanly express “deferred / queued / not yet started.” In practice, three project notes handle this by omitting the status field entirely:

This creates two problems:

  1. Ambiguity at filter time — Bases / Dataview queries filtering on status either need to special-case empty values or risk silently excluding deferred projects.
  2. Convention drift — A new contributor (or me, in 6 months) reading the README would assume omitting status is an error, not a signal. The actual convention has diverged from the documented one.

paused implies “started, then stopped.” stale implies “started, then neglected.” Neither fits “queued for the future, not yet begun.”

Approach

  1. Decide between two paths:
    • Path A: Add a status value. Introduce backlog (or deferred / queued) as the canonical “not yet started” status. Update README and backfill the three existing no-status notes.
    • Path B: Formalize empty-status semantics. Document in README that omitting status means “not yet started.” Update Bases / Dataview queries to handle this explicitly.
  2. Write an ADR capturing the decision and rationale.
  3. Apply the chosen convention to the three existing notes.
  4. (If Path A) Update x/templates/project-note.md to optionally include the new status, and consider a default for new projects.

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