What are tasks?

A task is one piece of work with somebody's name on it and, usually, a date. Fairgreen Golf Co. uses them for everything from "chase Portside Mills for the lab dip" to "shoot the autumn lookbook".

If a person has to do it and somebody else is waiting on it, it is a task. Tasks live in the Work area of the menu, and they are always on in every workspace.

What does a task actually hold?

A title, and then as much or as little as the job needs. A description, a Status, a Department, a Project, a Cycle, an Assignee, a Due date and time, and a Priority.

Underneath that it can carry subtasks, files, comments, and a note of which other tasks it is waiting on. Everything except the title and the department is optional, and you can add it later.

Department is the one setting you have to choose. It is not filing: it is who is allowed to touch the task afterwards. That is the single most useful thing to understand about the whole module, and How to work out who can do what in your workspace explains it properly.

Why not a shared to-do list?

Because a to-do list holds the work and nothing else. The moment somebody asks "why is this late", a list cannot answer.

Fairgreen ran their production chase-ups in a shared list for a year. It could say a task was open. It could not say the task was waiting on a sample that had not arrived, or that the person assigned had left, or what was decided in the conversation that started it.

A task in Tideswell sits next to the rest of the business. It can be created from a chat message and keep a link back to it, wait on another task, hang off a project and a campaign, and put its own file and comment history in one place.

Where do tasks show up?

In more places than you will use at first, which is deliberate: the same task appears wherever it is relevant rather than living in one list. All of them are in the Work area of the menu.

• Work › Inbox and Work › My tasks are yours: what changed on your work, and everything assigned to you. These are the two you will open every day.
• Work › Tasks opens the overview, with buttons for Board, Roadmap, Company calendar and Mission-critical.
• Work › Roadmap, Work › Calendar and Work › Urgent are the same views as rows of their own. Urgent and Mission-critical are two names for one page.
• Departments sits in the Work area under those rows. Each department folds open to its projects, and each has its own list, board and calendar.

Wherever you click a task title, the same panel slides in over the page you were on. You never lose your place, and closing it puts you back exactly where you were.

When is something else the better fit?

• A body of work with several tasks under it is a project, covered in What are projects and campaigns?. Projects have a lead, dates, milestones and a progress bar.
• A plan rather than the work itself belongs on a project's Overview, where you lay out what goes out and when. How to plan what goes out and when covers that, including turning a plan into a real task when it is time to start.
• A thing you are tracking rather than doing is a record. A repair or a fabric trial has a life of its own and is not one person's to-do. That is What is an Object?.
• A customer to call, email or text back is outreach, in Customers › Outreach. It keeps the contact, each try and the notes together, and raising one also raises a paired task. See How to log and work through outreach.

Read this section in order

Start with How to see what needs you to learn the screens you will live in. Then How to create a task and How to edit a task cover the whole lifecycle of a single task.

After that the pages are independent, so read what you need. How to break a task down and put it in order is worth reading before your first busy week, because sequencing work is what stops a board becoming a wish list.

How to add files and comments to a task covers the conversation on a task, and How to work a list, a board and a calendar the views that show a whole team's work at once. For the jobs that come up less often, read How to change many tasks at once and How to make a task repeat.