The Journey Lifecycle

"A journey is a state machine, and 'Start Logging' is the transition that changes what the whole conversation is about."

Four Phases

A journey moves through four phases: PLANNING, ACTIVE, COMPLETED, ARCHIVED. These are not cosmetic labels — each phase changes what the engine is for and how consultation behaves. Understanding the transitions is understanding how a trip actually lives inside Waystone.

What Each Transition Means

PLANNING. The journey has an internal identity but its dates are still fluid. Consultation is about "where should we go and what should we do?" Nothing is frozen yet.
PLANNING to ACTIVE (Start Logging). The one heavy transition. It is a domain transaction, not a button that opens an editor: it freezes the departure baseline, mints the journey UID, confirms the local date and time zone, binds the consultation thread, and creates the first day. The trip has begun.
ACTIVE. Consultation changes posture — from "where should we go?" to "given what is happening now, what should we do next?" Events, route changes, observations, and decisions attach to the current local day.
COMPLETED and ARCHIVED. Completing stops active capture and opens retrospective analysis. Archiving is a storage-and-visibility state — and crucially, it must never destroy the journey's ability to inform future consultation.

Archiving Is Not Forgetting

The last transition carries the most important subtlety. Archiving a journey is about visibility and storage tier, not erasure. The whole premise of the engine is that history compounds — so an archived trip is exactly the trip that should still be able to answer "how did the third Switzerland journey handle this?" when the fourth one is being planned. An archive that made a journey unqueryable would defeat the reason the engine exists. Archiving quiets a journey; it never silences it.

Code

The journey state machine·text

PLANNING --StartLogging--> ACTIVE --Complete--> COMPLETED --> ARCHIVED
   |                          |                     |             |
"where should            "what next,          retrospective   quiet, but
 we go?"                  given now?"          analysis        still queryable

# StartLogging is the heavy transition: baseline freeze, UID mint,
#   tz confirm, thread bind, first day. A transaction, not a click.
# ARCHIVED changes visibility, never the ability to inform trip N+1.

Exercise

Think about how a project or trip 'begins' in your current tools. Is there a real transition — a moment where the thing changes from 'being planned' to 'happening', with clear consequences — or does it just gradually slide from one to the other with no marked event? Name what you'd want to freeze, mint, or confirm at that transition if it existed.

Hint

Most tools have no real 'Start' transaction — planning just blurs into doing. But without a marked transition, there's no natural place to freeze a baseline or stamp an identity. The lifecycle model's power is that 'begin' becomes a real event with real effects, not a vibe.