Plans
Work items, projects, the Inbox, team Standup, two-way Jira/Linear sync, GitHub moving tickets, workflows, planning layers, and reports.
Plans is Align's execution app at plans.meet-align.com. It carries decisions and action items into owned, trackable work without losing the meeting, page, chat thread, or external system that produced them.
Start with Home, Inbox, and Your work
- Home is the workspace dashboard: active work, due-soon items, projects, decisions, and quick creation/import actions.
- Inbox holds new work and ticket updates Align picked up from your meetings, calls, code and documents. Nothing changes until you accept it (see below).
- Standup is today's standup for the whole Space, written from what actually happened (see below).
- Drafts shows work you created but have not fully placed.
- Your work has Summary, Assigned, Created, Subscribed, and Activity views, including workload/status breakdowns and recent activity.
- Starred collects important work and projects across the app.
The Inbox
After a meeting in an Align Room, a call captured with the browser extension, a push, or a document comment, Align drafts:
- new tasks, one per thing someone committed to or was asked to do, for that person;
- ticket updates for work already in flight, such as In progress → Blocked when someone says they're stuck, with the reason as a comment.
Align is deliberately strict about what becomes a task: it only drafts one for an explicit ask or commitment ("I'll send it Friday", "@Sam can you…", TODO(sam), "Action: …"), and every task has to quote the words it came from. A spec or PRD that merely describes work doesn't create tasks. At most five come from a meeting and two from a document.
The Inbox is organised by kind:
| Tab | What's in it |
|---|---|
| Ticket updates | Proposed stage moves and comments on existing tickets. Accept all is available here. |
| Tasks | New tasks, grouped by the meeting or document they came from (two shown per source, Show N more, Add all / Dismiss all). |
| Code | What your branches, pull requests and merges proposed. Activity that isn't linked to a ticket yet is listed plainly. |
| Projects | New projects Align spotted in your work, to create or skip. |
| History | What you accepted or dismissed, with Undo. |
The Inbox opens on the first tab with something in it. Notes show a short View PR / Open link instead of raw URLs. Accept, edit the title, dismiss, or Undo an accepted change. Cards you leave pending expire after 14 days. Keyboard: j/k to move, a to accept, d to dismiss.
Auto-move my own tickets applies ticket updates on work assigned to you without asking. It's off by default; new tasks always wait for you.
Standup
Standup writes everyone's standup from what happened since the last working day (Friday, on a Monday):
- Done: two to five lines on what the work achieved, written from commit messages, pull requests, coding-agent sessions and tickets that moved. It says Shipped two-way Linear sync, not pushed 3 commits. The commits and tickets behind it are one click away under the summary.
- Today: work in review or in progress, anything due or overdue, and what you took on in meetings.
- Blocked: blocked tickets and work waiting on someone else's unfinished item.
The page puts blockers across the team first, then one row per person. Copy all copies the whole team's standup for Slack. Your own card is also on Home, where Edit saves your own wording for the day (your edit wins over Align's) and Use Align's version goes back. Teammates only see lines about work they can open.
The same standup is what Align for Mac shows each weekday morning, what the my_standup MCP tool returns to a coding agent, and what meeting prep shows for standup meetings.
Work items
A work item can have:
- a workspace identifier such as
ALI-12; - status and priority, an assignee, due date, project, labels, and notes;
- comments with attachments and mentions;
- real subtasks and task-to-task relationships;
- blocking, blocked-by, and related links;
- subscribers, activity history, and a source record;
- related Decisions, Pages, Rooms, Projects, and external evidence;
- Slack sharing and GitHub, Linear, Jira, Figma, or Notion links when those providers are connected.
The board supports list and board-style work, filters, saved views, and bulk-friendly navigation. Marking an item complete preserves its history rather than removing it.
Custom workflows
Workflows define the columns shown on a board. Each custom state maps to a stable reporting category—Backlog, Todo, In progress, Done, or Blocked—so teams can use their own language without breaking progress, sprint, and report calculations.
You can create a workflow from a template or from scratch, reorder states, choose colors, and apply a workflow to the relevant project or workspace context.
Projects
A Project is more than a filtered task list. Its tabs bring planning, context, and evidence together:
| Area | What it contains |
|---|---|
| Overview and Health | Status, owner, target date, progress, recent changes, health and risk signals |
| Work and Timeline | Work board plus a time-oriented project view |
| Goals | Goals, measurable outcomes, and linked activity |
| Sprints, Milestones, Epics, Modules | Different planning and grouping layers |
| Dependencies | Project and item blockers, owners, reasons, and override paths |
| Files and Updates | Project resources and recurring progress updates |
| Decisions, Pages, Rooms | The collaboration records that explain the project |
| People and Activity | Members and the complete project trail |
Projects may be restricted, archived, starred, and linked to external implementation evidence. Project Prep uses the connected context to prepare a concise review.
Workspace planning
Plans also provides workspace-wide pages for:
- Views — reusable ways to find and group work;
- Sprints — time-boxed execution cycles;
- Milestones — dated delivery checkpoints;
- Initiatives — higher-level programs spanning projects;
- Epics and Modules — cross-item grouping and product structure;
- Reports — rollups for progress and execution health;
- Archives — completed or archived projects kept out of the active workspace.
The sidebar can be customized per browser: pin the workspace pages you use and hide optional personal shortcuts.
Jira and Linear, both ways
Open a project and choose Sync with Jira or Linear, then pick the Jira project or Linear team. Edits flow both ways within seconds: title, description, status, assignee, priority, due date and comments. Status mapping lines up your Plans workflow with the tracker's statuses, Bring in open issues imports what's already there, and Stop syncing new work ends the link without deleting anything. A synced item shows ⇄ Synced with Jira · ENG-231 with the last sync time.
Tasks you accept from the Inbox in a synced project are created in the tracker too, so the team can keep living in Jira or Linear.
GitHub moves tickets
Branches, pull requests and merges move your tickets: a branch starts work, a PR puts it in review, a merge marks it done. Align matches the ticket key in the branch or PR, or the open ticket the change is clearly about. Moves arrive in the Inbox's Code tab as suggestions unless Auto-move my own tickets is on.
When a move is applied, the ticket gets a clean comment such as Merged pull request #4: Add CSV export with a link to the PR, mirrored to Jira or Linear when the project syncs.
Align picks up code activity two ways: from each person's connected GitHub login (checked every few minutes), or instantly from the Align GitHub App installed on your organization. Commits that Claude Code or Codex make on your Mac count too (see Align for Mac).
Import and delivery evidence
The Import from tools flow can bring connected external objects into Align without copy/paste. On an individual item, implementation links keep the upstream system authoritative while showing useful state in context:
- GitHub pull requests and issues can show checks, review, and merge state.
- Linear and Jira issues can show status, assignee, and priority.
- A completed or merged upstream object moves the linked Align item to Done.
- Figma and Notion links keep designs and specs beside the work.
See Integrations for permissions, connection setup, and plan limits.
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