would let you see something like:
Publish AFR
14 flight-path events over 9 days
4 direct · 7 adjacent · 3 emergent
touched across website, distribution research, UX polish, pricing, and release notes
Which is exactly the opposite of “I didn’t work on AFR today.” You may have moved it materially without ever sitting down for a single monolithic AFR session.
I’d keep the feature very light:
Want To Do
title
optional note
active / paused / done
maybe a horizon like soon / later / someday
no due date required
Then on each flight-path event: attach to one or more Want To Dos.
And the payoff screen is not a kanban board. It is progress evidence: a timeline or map showing how attention contributed.
That feels extremely aligned with your observation that the steps disappear if you only look at the endpoint. AFR could make the path toward the thing visible without pretending the path should have been linear.