HiggSmart - User Guide

1 Getting Started

HiggSmart is the project and task management hub for Higginbotham teams. Login is just your @higginbotham.net email, no password.

Your first login

The first time you sign in, HiggSmart provisions a personal task sheet in the background. You will see a brief setup splash that usually takes 5 to 10 seconds. After that, your dashboard is ready and your personal sheet will hold every task you create that is not tied to a specific project.

Adding tasks

There are three main ways to add work in HiggSmart:

Click the + New button in the top right of the Dashboard to open the Add Task or Add Event modal.
Type into the Quick-Add bar at the top of the Dashboard. It accepts natural language, for example "Call Pappas BBQ Friday" or "Team meeting tomorrow 3pm".
Ask Higgington in the chat panel at the bottom right of any page. Higgington can create tasks, schedule events, plan projects, and more.

Choosing your view

The Dashboard offers four view modes via the dropdown in the title area:

List: tasks grouped into Overdue, Today, This Week, Later, and No Due Date buckets. A sub-toggle lets you switch to a By Project grouping.
Kanban: three columns for Overdue, Not Started, and In Progress. Great for quickly seeing where your work stands.
Calendar: a full-month grid with tasks and events on their due dates. Use the Prev, Today, and Next buttons to step through months.
Inbox: shows tasks recently assigned to you on project sheets that you have not started yet.

Tip: Whichever mode you pick, your selection is remembered while you navigate so you can leave and come back without losing your place.

2 Adding Tasks and Events

The Add modal

The + New button opens a modal with two tabs:

Task tab: title, project, assignee, start and due dates, priority, tags, and free-form notes.
Event tab: title, single or multi-day date range, all-day or specific start and end times, location, type, attendees, and notes.

If you do not pick a project, the task is filed on your personal sheet. Assignee defaults to you, but you can hand a task to a teammate from the dropdown.

The Quick-Add bar

The Quick-Add bar at the top of the Dashboard takes plain English and turns it into a task. Try things like:

Email Sarah the renewal packet by Friday
Lunch with Macie tomorrow at noon
High priority - submit Q4 numbers by next Tuesday

Quick-Add hands the text to Higgington, which parses the date, priority, and any context, then creates the task on your personal sheet. The chat panel will pop open so you can confirm what was made.

Creating tasks with Higgington

You can also create tasks from a regular chat message, for example: "Add a task to follow up with Pappas BBQ next Wednesday, high priority, tag it Renewals." Higgington picks the right project sheet, fills in the dates, and confirms the result.

3 Projects

A project in HiggSmart is a dedicated sheet that groups related tasks. Visit the Projects page to see what you have, create new ones, and open project dashboards.

Creating a project

On the Projects page, click + New Project. Pick a name, optional description, and start and end dates. You can either start with an empty project or use the "Let Higgington build my project timeline" toggle.

AI project planning

When you flip on the "Let Higgington build my project timeline" toggle, you describe what you are trying to do in a sentence or two. Higgington generates a structured timeline with phases, milestones, and tasks with realistic durations and dependencies. You can edit anything it produces before saving.

Good for: client onboardings, renewal cycles, marketing campaigns, implementations, anything with multiple steps and people. Just give Higgington the gist and let it draft the plan.

The project dashboard

Every project has its own dashboard with:

KPI cards for total tasks, completion percentage, overdue, upcoming, and at-risk items
A horizontal timeline showing each task or phase as a bar
A risks panel where you and Higgington can log concerns and mitigations
A detailed task list that expands parent rows to show subtasks

4 Higgington - the AI Assistant

Higgington is the friendly AI assistant that lives in the bottom-right corner of every HiggSmart page. Click Ask Higgington to open the chat panel.

What Higgington can do

Higgington has 25+ tools it can call to read or change your data, including:

get_my_tasks - pull your task list with filters
create_task, update_task, delete_task - manage individual tasks
plan_project_from_brief - generate a full project plan from a description
analyze_file - read a PDF, Word doc, image, or CSV you upload and pull out tasks, summaries, or action items
create_event - schedule meetings and events on your calendar
add_risk, resolve_risk - log and clear project risks
Plus tools for tags, project KPIs, team workload, and more

Uploading files

Click the paperclip icon in the chat input, or drag a file straight onto the chat panel. Higgington can summarize PDFs, extract tasks from meeting notes, pull deadlines out of contracts, or describe what is in an image. Just say what you want done with the file.

TPG Mode (admins only)

If you are an admin, you will see a TPG Mode toggle that switches Higgington to Claude Opus with extended thinking turned on. This is heavier and slower, but gives you stronger reasoning on complex prompts like multi-step project planning or detailed file analysis.

5 Workload

The Workload page is a horizontal timeline that shows who is working on what across a date range. Each row is a person; each column is a day.

What you can see

Visibility depends on your team setup:

Team leads see every member of their team and all their tasks. Use the date filter to look at a specific week, month, or longer.
Members on a team with "Open Visibility" can see their teammates' tasks. This is useful for collaborative teams who plan together.
Everyone else sees their own work. The server filters server-side so you only get the data you are allowed to see.

Filtering by date

Use the date range picker at the top of the page to focus on a window of time. Tasks outside the range are hidden so you can plan around upcoming deadlines without scrolling forever.

6 Events

Events are distinct from tasks. An event has a date and optionally a time, a location, and attendees, but it does not have a percent-complete or a status. Use events for meetings, deadlines, conferences, and anything that happens at a moment in time.

Where events show up

On the Dashboard's Calendar view, color-coded purple to distinguish them from tasks
On the dedicated Events page where you can filter by type, attendee, or date range
In your task counts and Higgington's responses when you ask "what is on my calendar this week"

Creating events

Open the + New modal and pick the Event tab. Fill in title, date, optional end date for multi-day events, all-day or specific times, location, type (Meeting, Event, Deadline, or Other), attendees, and notes.

7 Tags

Tags are color-coded labels you can attach to tasks. They are great for cross-cutting categories like Renewals, Onboarding, Compliance, or anything else your team tracks.

Adding tags

In the Add Task modal, hold Ctrl (or Cmd on Mac) and click in the Tags dropdown to pick multiple. You can also ask Higgington to tag a task: "Tag the Pappas task as Renewals and Q4."

Filtering by tag

Use the Filter button at the top of the Dashboard to limit your view to one or more tags. The filter applies across List, Kanban, and Calendar modes.

8 Admin Features

Admins (set via a checkbox in the user directory) see two extra nav items: Users and Teams.

Users page

The Users page is a searchable directory of every HiggSmart user with their team, admin status, and contact info. Use it to find someone, change their team, or grant admin access.

Teams page

The Teams page is where you create teams, assign team leads, and flip the "Open Visibility" flag on or off for each team. Open Visibility means every member of that team can see every other member's tasks, which is useful for tightly-collaborating groups.

Token quotas

Every user has a daily token quota for chatting with Higgington. The default is 50,000 tokens per day, which covers normal use easily. Admins are exempt from the quota. When a user crosses 80% of their daily allowance they get a soft warning; at 100% Higgington is paused until the next day. The quota resets at midnight Central time.

9 FAQ

Ask Pat Gordon (pgordon@higginbotham.net) to look you up in the user directory. He can also re-send your provisioning info if needed.

Yes. Open the task by clicking its card and use the Delete button at the bottom of the detail modal. To delete several at once, check the boxes on the task cards, then click Delete on the bulk action bar at the bottom of the screen.

In v1, recurring tasks are handled with tags. Create a tag like Weekly or Monthly and apply it to anything that repeats so you can filter to it. Full recurring-task automation (auto-create the next occurrence when you mark one done) is on the roadmap for v2.

Yes. Assign the task to any HiggSmart user via the Assignee dropdown. The task lands on their inbox the next time they refresh, regardless of team membership.

Completed tasks stay on your sheet for reference. They are filtered out of the default Dashboard views, but you can still find them via the By Project tab, the Calendar (on their original due date), and by asking Higgington ("show me what I finished last week").

A task that has children (rows indented beneath it) becomes a parent task. Parents roll up percent-complete from their children automatically. On a project sheet, drag-indent in the underlying view, or ask Higgington to create a task group with N subtasks.

Tell Higgington in the same chat. "That date is wrong, it should be Friday not Thursday." Higgington will correct it. If something feels broken, use the Report Issue button in the header to file feedback that goes straight to Pat.

Yes. The whole app responds down to phone widths. The header collapses, KPI cards stack, and the chat panel takes most of the screen. You can do everything on your phone that you can do on desktop.

HiggSmart User Guide

1 Getting Started

Your first login

Adding tasks

Choosing your view

2 Adding Tasks and Events

The Add modal

The Quick-Add bar

Creating tasks with Higgington

3 Projects

Creating a project

AI project planning

The project dashboard

4 Higgington - the AI Assistant

What Higgington can do

Uploading files

TPG Mode (admins only)

5 Workload

What you can see

Filtering by date

6 Events

Where events show up

Creating events

7 Tags

Adding tags

Filtering by tag

8 Admin Features

Users page

Teams page

Token quotas

9 FAQ