Activities

Most evidence has a source, and that source often isn't a platform. It's a discovery workshop, a stakeholder interview round, a competitor audit, or the deliverable you produced at the end of a phase. An activity is a record of that work: what it was, when it happens, who is on it, and everything that came out of it.

That makes an activity two things at once — a scheduled block on the plan, and the group that holds the research and experience items it produced. No other artefact in Crux does both.

Create an activity

• Plan → Overview — the Activity button inside a milestone, or at the bottom under Not in a milestone.
• Plan → Calendar or Timeline — New → Activity, or double-click a day on the calendar.
• Research → Create — pick Activity (the first item in the menu).
• From a research item — Assign → Create new → Activity.

What an activity holds

Group items under it

Open an activity and use the Graph panel (same overlay as notes, evidence, and experience) to link anything that belongs to it: notes, evidence, files, highlights, tables, user tests, usability findings, other activities, and experience pages, features, or content. The relationship is many-to-many — an item can sit under more than one activity, and an activity holds as many items as you need. See Working with an open item for how that panel behaves everywhere else.

You can also work from the other end. Assign on a research item attaches it to an activity without opening the activity first, which is the quicker path when you are working through a list of findings. To-dos join the same way: Schedule & assign on a to-do row attaches it to one or more activities.

Read it as a job: actions, and what each one produces

An activity is a job with a goal. Its to-dos are the steps that get there, and a deliverable says what each step has to leave behind — the current-state journey, the themes table, the three pages you are going to change. Steps & deliverables on the Notes tab shows that structure as a sequence: each step, with the artefacts expected beneath it.

Each deliverable names a label and the kind of Crux artefact it expects (journey, persona, table, gap, page, usability scan, and so on). Fill it either way round:

• Link — pick an artefact that already exists. Anything already linked to the activity moves into the deliverable rather than being duplicated.
• Create — make the artefact from scratch, named after the deliverable, and it is filled in the same step.

Add a deliverable with the + on a step. Use Add step to extend the sequence. Deliverables without a step hang on the activity itself — the first card, named after the activity. Move to on any deliverable shifts it between steps.

Three more actions sit on every deliverable: Waive it when the work made it unnecessary — it drops out of the count but stays on the record — and Remove deliverable when it was never the right expectation. Removing one leaves whatever filled it linked to the activity.

Start from a job template

Not sure where to start? On an activity with nothing on it yet, Use a job template builds the whole shape in one step — the to-dos and the deliverable expected from each:

A template is only a head start: it writes ordinary to-dos and deliverables, so rename, drop, or add to them freely. A job you build by hand is the same thing without the shortcut, and the Agent names deliverables too when it drafts a plan — each step that should leave an artefact behind carries it in the draft, and the preview shows what each activity delivers before you save.

Tick it off when the work is done

Activities are work, so they complete like a to-do. There are four ways to mark one:

• Mark complete on the activity itself.
• Set its Status to Done — the two are kept in step.
• On the Research list, open the row's edit menu and choose Mark complete.
• Select several rows and use the Action menu next to the filters, which completes every activity in the selection at once.

A completed activity keeps its place with a tick and a struck-through title, so history stays intact, and Mark as not complete reopens it.

Deliverables never block completion. If required ones are still empty, Crux names what is missing and asks you to confirm — real work sometimes ends without the artefact you expected, and that is your call to make, not the tool's.

Filter Research and Experience by activity

Both lists carry an Activity filter alongside the type and source filters. Pick one or more activities and the list narrows to the items grouped under them — so "show me everything that came out of the discovery workshop" is one click, across evidence and product structure at the same time.

Because the filter lives on both tabs, the same activity answers two different questions: what did we learn, and what did we change. The sidebar Activities section does the same job from the other direction — select an activity there and Research filters to it.

Activities on the plan

An activity with a date appears on the calendar and the timeline, nested under its milestone, with its to-dos beneath it. An activity without a date waits in the unscheduled tray until you drag it onto a day. See Plan: calendar & timeline.

Next

Continue the guide with Plan: the Board.