The Q4 Goal Map went into the vault in September and has been the most duplicated Notion file since. This is a walkthrough of how it is put together and, more usefully, why it is put together that way.
If you would rather just use it, duplicate it and skip this. Nothing here is required reading.
Goals are rows, not pages
The first structural decision is that a goal is a row in a database rather than a page with a heading.
A heading in a document cannot be counted, filtered, rolled up or related to anything. A row can. That is the whole argument, and it is the difference between a goals page you write in January and a goals system that tells you something in March.
Each goal carries four properties beyond its name. A quarter, so old quarters can be filtered out rather than deleted. A metric, which is the number that decides whether it happened. A target for that number. And a status that is either On track, At risk or Done.
The metric field is the one people skip and the one that matters. "Grow the newsletter" is not a goal, it is a direction. "Newsletter subscribers, target 800" can be assessed on a Friday in ninety seconds. If a goal genuinely has no number, write the observable thing that will be true instead: "shop update is live".
Tip. Four goals is the practical ceiling for a quarter. The template does not stop you adding a fifth, but every quarter we have watched, the fifth is the one that does not move.
Actions do the work
Below the goals sits a second database of weekly actions, related to the goals.
An action is one thing you will do in one week. It has a goal, a week, and a done checkbox. That is all. It is deliberately not a full task manager, because a full task manager becomes the thing you maintain instead of the thing you do.
The relation is what makes this useful. Opening a goal shows every action ever taken toward it, in order. Six weeks in, that list is the honest record of whether the goal has had any attention. A goal with two actions against it in six weeks is not at risk, it is abandoned, and seeing that written down is the point.
The reverse direction matters too. An action with no goal attached is visible in its own view, and there should be very few. Work that serves no goal is not automatically wrong, but it is worth seeing how much of it there is.
Progress without percentages
Every goal shows a progress figure, and none of them are typed in by hand.
The rollup counts related actions and counts how many are done. A formula turns that into a completed fraction and a simple bar. When you tick an action, the goal updates. There is no recalculation step, no weekly maintenance, and no number that is quietly six weeks stale.
This is a deliberate rejection of the manual percentage field, which every goals template seems to include and which is always wrong. A human-entered "60% done" reflects how the person felt when they typed it. A rollup reflects what actually happened.
There is a second formula worth knowing about: days remaining in the quarter, from the current date. Pairing "40% of actions done" with "18 days left" is what turns a dashboard into a decision. Either the remaining actions fit in eighteen days or they do not, and if they do not, the honest move is to cut a goal rather than to keep the status at On track.
The Friday view
The template ships with a view called Friday, and it is the only one you need to open regularly.
It shows this week's actions, grouped by goal, with the goal's progress visible in the group header. It takes about ten minutes to work through: tick what happened, move what did not, and write next week's actions underneath.
Two habits make this stick. Do it at the same time every week, because a review that floats is a review that stops. And when you move an action forward for the third time, delete it instead. Three deferrals is the system telling you the action is not going to happen, and carrying it a fourth week only makes the list less trustworthy.
Closing a quarter
The last page in the template is a quarter review, and it asks five questions. What moved. What did not. What you learned about how you work. What carries into next quarter. What you are explicitly dropping.
The fifth question is the one people leave blank and the one with the most value in it. A goal that survives three quarters untouched is not a goal, and writing "dropping this" once is far better than carrying it silently forever.
When the review is done, change the quarter property on the goals you are keeping, archive the rest, and the dashboard is ready for the next ninety days. The old quarter stays queryable, which means in a year you have four honest records of what you actually did rather than four documents full of aspiration.
The Q4 Goal Map is in the vault for every member, and it duplicates into your workspace in one click. It works on the free Notion plan, and nothing in it depends on a paid feature.