Do not convert every branch
The instinct after finishing a map is to turn each branch into a task. Resist it — that is how a useful structure becomes a forty-item list you avoid opening, and you have destroyed the thing that made the map worth building.
Most branches are not tasks. They are areas, conditions, questions, or things you are deliberately not doing yet. Converting them all flattens exactly the distinction the map existed to preserve.
The test: do you know the next physical action?
A branch becomes a task only when you can state what you would physically do, and when you could tell afterwards whether you had done it.
- "Improve my portfolio" — not a task. What would you do first?
- "Pick three projects to write up" — task.
- "Understand the market" — not a task.
- "Read ten job ads and list the requirements I fail" — task.
If you cannot name the physical action, the branch is not ready. That is information, not a failure: it usually means you do not yet know enough, and the honest next step is a small probe that produces information rather than a task that produces output.
Only the active branches produce tasks
The second discipline, and the one that keeps the list survivable.
Generating tasks from the whole map produces a list containing work for things you are not doing this quarter. Generate them only from the branches currently getting attention — in Minty Path, the one to three marked Focus.
Everything else stays on the map, visible and inactive, producing no tasks. That is the correct state for most of a plan most of the time, and it is why the map can hold twelve areas without the task list becoming unusable.
Three to five, not everything
Even within an active branch, resist listing every task you can foresee. Foreseen tasks are guesses, and guesses made before you start are usually wrong in ways that only become clear after the first one.
Three to five per active branch is plenty. Complete a couple, then look again — you will know more, and the next tasks will be better ones.
Keep the task attached to the branch
This is where most workflows break. Tasks get extracted into a separate app, the map stays behind, and within a fortnight they disagree. The task list is what you look at daily, so the map is the one that stops being updated — and the reasoning quietly stops informing the work.
The fix is not discipline. It is not extracting them in the first place.
In Minty Path a Todo lives on the branch it serves. There is no second copy and nothing to synchronise, so a task always carries the context of why it exists. All Todos then reads across every Growth Path when you want the flat view, and each entry links back to its branch.
You can also create several at once — each non-empty line becomes its own Todo, up to 100 in a batch — which is usually how a session of "what actually needs doing here" ends.
What is not a task
Three things get miscategorised, and each has a better home:
Time-bound commitments are Reminders, or a Deadline if genuinely fixed by something outside you. "Call the dentist" is a task; "the application closes on the 14th" is not — it is a date, and putting it on a checklist means it can be ticked without being true.
Things you need to know are notes, not tasks. Burying a fact inside an unchecked checkbox makes it invisible in every list you scan.
Things you might do someday belong on the map, unfocused, or in the Inbox. Putting them on the list is how the list becomes something you feel bad about.
Closing the loop
A task being ticked does not mean a branch is finished. Minty Path keeps these separate on purpose: completing todos does not change a branch's status, and a branch cannot reach Proven without evidence attached — a file, a link, a result, a written note about what you applied.
Parent branches complete automatically once every end branch beneath them is Proven. You never mark a category done; it finishes when the work under it does.
So "I cleared six todos" and "the branch is actually finished" remain different claims. Lists conflate them, which is why a productive month can produce no visible progress and leave you unable to explain why.
The short version
- Only from Focus branches
- Only where you know the physical next action
- Three to five per branch, then reassess
- Keep them on the branch, not in a separate app
- Dates, facts, and maybes are not tasks
- Ticking todos is not finishing — evidence closes a branch
Try it without an account — build a small map, mark one branch Focus, and put real todos on it. The difference between a list that knows why it exists and one that does not shows up within a week.