Capture and route ideas

Ideas are the fifth work artifact in Onplana, and they sit at the very top of the funnel. An idea is a thought you have not committed to yet: no assignee, no due date, no progress bar.

Ideas never chase you

A captured idea does not appear in My Work, your task counts, My Day, or any reminder. That is deliberate. Writing an idea down should cost you nothing, so there is never a reason to keep it in your head instead.

Your ideas start private

Every idea you capture is private to you until you decide otherwise. You do not have to take that on trust or remember it: the capture box says so before you type, in the web app and in both companions, and every saved idea carries a badge showing exactly who can see it (Private to you, Shared, or Everyone in the org). When you are ready for other eyes you have two moves, both on the idea itself:

• Share… picks specific people or teams. They can read the idea and join its debate; they cannot edit it.
• Open to everyone makes it visible across the organization, which also lets teammates help triage its status.

You can make an idea private again at any time, which also closes any debate.

Open an idea for debate

Once an idea has an audience, choose Open for debate. That turns on a comment thread on the idea, the same comments you already use on tasks and issues, so people can argue for it, against it, or sharpen it before you commit to anything. Only you (its creator) control the audience and the debate.

AI feedback reads the debate. Once an idea is open for debate, re-running Get AI feedback weighs what your colleagues actually argued: it engages the strongest objection, skips concerns someone already answered, and a convincing argument can change the route it suggests. Comments are treated strictly as material to evaluate, never as instructions to the AI.

Capture without deciding anything

The one rule of idea capture: you never have to pick a project. Leaving the project as General is the normal case, and it is the default.

1. Open Ideas in the left navigation.

2. Type the idea into the box at the top. A single line is enough, but the box takes as much as you want to write: the first line becomes the title and anything after it is saved as the idea’s detail.

3. Press Capture, or Ctrl+Enter (Cmd+Enter on a Mac) without leaving the keyboard. Leave the project picker on General unless the idea clearly belongs somewhere.

You can file it to a project later, or never. An idea that stays General for a month is working exactly as intended.

Capture from your browser or desktop

The browser extension and the Windows app both have a 💡 button next to the add-task button. It saves whatever you have typed as an idea instead of a task, and unlike the task button it needs no project at all.

Reading something worth remembering? Use 💡 As idea in the extension to save the current page. The page link is kept on the idea itself, so you can find your way back to the source later.

Ask AI what it thinks

Open any idea and choose Get AI feedback. Onplana reads the idea alongside your organization’s goals and returns:

• a short, honest critique, including what is weak or unclear
• the questions that would most change your decision
• concrete risks or costs
• the smallest sensible next step
• how well it fits your actual strategy, naming a goal where one applies
• a recommended route: task, proposal, or park

The recommendation is advice, not an action

Feedback never promotes anything on its own. It suggests a lane and explains why; you decide. You can re-run it after sharpening the idea.

Feedback is available on every plan and draws on your organization’s AI token balance, so it runs when you ask for it rather than automatically in the background.

Route it into real work

When an idea is worth acting on, promote it. There are two lanes, and picking the right one is the point of the whole screen.

Promote to a task All plans

The fast lane, for something small and clear that one person can just do. Choose the project and promote. The new task is assigned to you so it shows up in your task list immediately.

Send to governance Enterprise

The lane for material investment: cross-team work, real budget, or anything needing sign-off before it starts. Promoting opens a draft proposal carrying the idea’s title, description, and (when the AI pass has run) a first draft of the strategic rationale and business justification.

The proposal always starts in Draft, so promoting an idea can never skip a gate. A human reviews and completes the business case before it enters the proposal review pipeline.

Note

The governance lane appears only on plans that include governance. On other plans you will simply see the task lane, and capture works exactly the same.

Park or drop what you are not doing

Not every idea deserves work, and saying so is healthier than letting it rot in a list.

• Parked means “not now”. You can bring a parked idea back to New or Exploring at any time.
• Dropped means “no”. It stays as a record of the decision.

Deleting an idea is different from dropping it: Dropped keeps the record of a decision, while Delete moves the idea to the recycle bin, where it can be restored along with its debate and everyone you had shared it with.

Promoted and Dropped are final. If you want to revisit a dropped idea later, capture a fresh one, which costs you seconds.

Who can do what

Role	Ideas
Any member	Capture; full control of their own ideas (visibility, debate, promote, delete)
Teammates	See ideas shared with them or opened to everyone; join open debates; help triage org-open ideas
Owner, Admin, Manager	Additionally delete org-visible ideas (never see private ones)
Guest	Read only

An idea is visible only to the people its creator chose: nobody else, including administrators, can see a private idea. Ideas filed to a project additionally follow that project’s access, so an idea can never reveal a project you cannot already see.

Find ideas later

Use the All / General / Mine tabs and the status filter on the Ideas page to narrow things down, and connected agents can list and read your ideas directly.

Ideas are also included in your organization’s AI knowledge search where that is enabled, so asking what you have already thought about a topic can surface them without you remembering where you filed it.

Agents can capture ideas too

A connected agent (Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor, and others) can capture and read ideas through Onplana’s agent tools, including filing one with no project. This means an agent that notices something worth considering during other work can write it down without inventing a task nobody agreed to.