The Work Hierarchy

The six-layer framework that makes Foundry a coherent operating system

Without a formal hierarchy, all work feels equally important. A shower thought competes for attention against a strategic bet. A commitment to reply to someone sits alongside a decision that could change the business in two years.

The absence of hierarchy produces founder fragmentation, the feeling of working constantly but not advancing anything that matters.

Foundry's work hierarchy makes stratification explicit and enforced. Not everything is at the same altitude. Altitude determines: how something gets evaluated, what can defer what, and where your most serious attention belongs.

What it is not: A quarterly goal. A vision statement for a specific product. A personal motivation.

In Foundry: Not a first-class model. Mission lives in your Vision document and in your head. It is the lens you apply when evaluating strategic priorities, not something the system tracks directly.

Common confusion: Treating a product goal ("ship BabyBlocks v2") as a Mission. Product goals are at the Project or Strategic Priority layer. Mission sits above them: "Build a portfolio of compounding solo-founder products that generate durable, low-maintenance revenue."

What it is not: A task. A project. A quarterly target metric.

In Foundry: Not a first-class model. Strategic priorities are expressed through:

• Which projects you have marked ACTIVE


• The energy types you assign to those projects


• The Focus Lane designation


• The decisions you log about direction changes

Common confusion: Treating a project as a strategic priority. A strategic priority answers "what are we organizing our efforts around?" A project answers "what are we specifically building?" One priority may be served by multiple projects.

What it is not: A category. A folder. A permanent container. A bucket.

In Foundry: First-class Project model. Status: ACTIVE / PARKED / COMPLETED / ARCHIVED. Energy type (COMPOUNDING / DRAINING / NEUTRAL / MAINTENANCE). Health score. Journal, commitments, linked ideas and decisions. Capacity-governed via Focus page.

Why time-boxed matters: A project that never closes is functioning as a folder, not an initiative. Projects should have endings, even if the ending is "this is done and we're not doing more." If a project would run forever, it might be a category, not a project.

Common confusions:

• Using "Marketing" as a project → Marketing is a function, not an initiative. "Q2 Launch Positioning Work" is a project.


• Activating a project without checking capacity → See Layer 2 and the Focus page first.

What it is not: A project (too small). A task (too strategic and complex). A raw idea (an initiative is committed work, not a candidate).

In Foundry today: Initiatives are not a first-class model. They are expressed through:

• Project journal entries (naming and describing workstreams)


• Tags (grouping ideas and assets under a named theme)


• Decisions scoped to a project (capturing initiative-level choices)

What it is not: A project. A raw idea. A task. A commitment.

In Foundry: An Idea with status CLASSIFIED and a linked OpportunityScore. The triage outcome (BUILD_NOW, EXPLORE_ACTIVELY, COMPOUNDING_ASSET, etc.) is the classification. Opportunities live in the Vault and surface in Recommendations when conditions warrant revisiting them.

The most important rule in this entire hierarchy:

> A BUILD_NOW triage outcome does not create a project. It signals that this opportunity is high-priority. The founder promotes it to a project explicitly, when capacity allows.

This gap between "this is a great opportunity" and "this is my current focus" is intentional. Triage tells you the potential. The Focus page tells you whether you have capacity. You make the decision.

What it is not: An internal to-do. A project milestone. A goal. Something you told yourself you'd do.

Why this distinction matters: Broken external promises have relationship consequences that missed internal tasks don't. They deserve their own surface, overdue detection, and person-level filtering, not because they're more important than strategic work, but because the accountability structure is different.

In Foundry: First-class Commitment model. Status: OPEN / DONE / DROPPED. Due date with overdue detection (surfaces on Today). Person field for filter-by-person before meetings.

Common confusion: Using commitments as a task manager. "Update my portfolio site" is not a commitment, it's an internal intention. "Send the revised proposal to Sarah by Wednesday" is a commitment. The difference is the person and the external accountability.

Work moves between layers through explicit actions, not automatically.

From Capture → Opportunity: An Idea is captured (RAW), then triaged (IN_TRIAGE), then classified (CLASSIFIED) with an outcome. This is the promotion from intake to Opportunity.

From Opportunity → Project: The founder explicitly creates a Project and marks it ACTIVE, after checking capacity on the Focus page. A BUILD_NOW score does not do this for you.

From Project → Commitment: A commitment made in the context of a project is linked to that project. Commitments are the execution surface of project work that involves external accountability.

Capacity suppression: A high-scoring opportunity may not become a project right now. Important does not mean do now. Capacity governs what becomes active, regardless of score.

Applied Example