Project Tasks

Flowtly Editorial Team5 min

The Tasks tab, on a project's page, tracks the project's task lists and individual tasks, letting you break project work into trackable items with their own status, priority and recurrence.

Task lists

Tasks can be grouped into task lists to organize work within a project. Each list has a name and is scoped to a single project.

A new project starts with three ready-made lists — Decisions, Work, and Documents — so you never have to invent a name before you can group anything. They group tasks by what kind of work each one is, not by how far along it is — that's what a task's status already tracks. Rename them, reorder them, delete them, or add your own; the starting set is a suggestion, not a requirement.

Statuses

Every task has a status. Statuses are shared, ordered entries with a name and a color, edited from the workflow view.

Beyond its name and color, a status carries two marks that say what it means:

  • Mark this status as work in progress — reaching this status means the work has started. In progress is the usual one.
  • Mark this status as closed — reaching this status means the work is over. Done is the usual one.

A status can also be set as the default, which is the status a newly created task starts in.

The two marks are independent. A status may carry both, one, or neither, and more than one status may carry the same mark — a project with In progress and In review can mark both as work in progress, and one with Done and Cancelled can mark both as closed. Nothing forces a project to use them at all.

They are worth setting, because they are what Flowtly reads to offer to move a task on after time is logged against it. A project whose statuses carry neither mark works normally; it simply never gets that offer.

Moving a task on after logging time

Logging time against a task is a good moment to notice that its status no longer matches reality. After the time entry is saved, Flowtly offers to move the task on:

  • A task that has not been started is offered the status that means work is under way — Move to In progress.
  • A task that is already under way is offered the closing status — Mark as Done. Finishing a piece of work and recording the hours for it is one motion, so closing it does not mean leaving time tracking to go and find the task.

It is an offer, not a rule. It appears as a brief message that fades on its own, and only selecting the action changes anything. Ignoring it costs nothing and does not need to be dismissed — which matters, because logging time is one of the most frequent things anyone does here, and eight hours logged very often means the work is half done rather than finished.

The status offered comes from what the project's statuses are marked as meaning — work in progress, or closed — never from the order the columns happen to sit in on a board. Dragging your columns around therefore cannot change what gets offered. A project that has never marked any status as work in progress gets no Move to offer, because there is no status to move to; marking one is all it takes.

Where a project has more than one status of a kind, the offer takes the first one:

  • Among statuses meaning work is under way, the earliest — so a task reads as just started rather than being skipped further along.
  • Among closing statuses, the earliest — the board's ordinary completion column. Where a project has both a Done and a Cancelled, cancelling is the exception and is never what gets offered after somebody has just logged work.

Nothing is offered at all when there is nothing sensible to offer: a task with no status, a task that is already closed, or a project whose statuses do not distinguish the state being offered. In those cases logging time simply saves the entry, with no message.

Priority

Each task has a priority: Low, Normal, High, or Urgent. Normal is the default.

Assignees and subscribers

A task can have multiple assignees, who are notified by email when they are assigned to it. Employees can also subscribe to a task to receive updates without being an assignee — for example when they leave a comment.

Comments

Assignees and subscribers can discuss a task through comments. Each comment records its author and timestamp. When a new comment is added, subscribers to the task are notified by email.

Recurrence

Tasks can recur on a daily, weekly, or monthly schedule. A recurrence rule defines the frequency, interval, an optional end date, and a maximum number of occurrences; each generated occurrence is a normal task linked back to the rule that created it.

Status change notifications

When a task's status changes, its assignees are notified by email.

Views

The Tasks tab offers list, board, calendar, and workflow views of the same underlying tasks, so you can work with the layout that best fits the task at hand.

Example use cases

  • Mark a project's In progress status as work in progress, so that logging time against a not-yet-started task offers to move it there.
  • Log the morning's hours against a task and start it in the same motion, without opening the board.
  • Finish a piece of work, record the time it took, and close the task from the same prompt.
  • Ignore the prompt on a task that is only part-done — the hours are recorded and the status is left alone.

Connection map

Refers toDerived fromPart ofPlanned vs actual
Documented hereDocumented elsewhere
budget covers project. invoice billed from project. project is of type project-type. project identified by project-reference. project staffed by person. project-rate rates person. project-rate applies on project. time-entry tracked against project. task belongs to project. project-folder groups project. project linked to budget. project-template creates project. project-phase is a child project of project. project needs role. booking planned vs actual time-entry.coversbilled fromis of typeidentified bystaffed byratesapplies ontracked againstbelongs togroupslinked tocreatesis a child project ofneedsplanned vs actualBBudget — The financial envelope an engagement is measured against — what was planned, versus what has actually been spent.BudgetPProject — The core organizational unit for a business initiative, client engagement or internal work. Everything tracked — time, cost, invoicing, profitability — hangs off one.ProjectIInvoice — A sales document issued to a client: line items, dates, tax. It is created, reviewed, previewed and then sent.InvoicePProject type — Fixed-price, Time & Material, Non-billable or Internal. It decides how the project's tracking and reporting behave.Project typePProject reference — An optional key a project carries so systems outside Flowtly can name it. Unique within the organisation, and never reused once it has been given to a project.Project referencePPerson — An employee. The central record the rest of the workforce data hangs off — profile, documents, leave, benefits, rates.PersonMMember rate — A team member's billing or cost rate on a project. Rates are per member, so the same person can cost differently on two projects.Member rateTTime entry — What actually happened — work time logged against a project.Time entryTTask — A unit of work inside a project.TaskPProject folder — A grouping of projects, for organisations running more than a handful.Project folderPProject template — A reusable blueprint for a project: its phases, task lists and tasks, with timings held as day offsets rather than dates. It carries no client, no team and nothing financial.Project templatePPhase — A stage a project runs through. A phase is itself a child project, so everything true of a project is true of a phase.PhaseRRole — One job to be done on a project. It may be open, partly filled, filled or over-filled, and it exists whether or not anyone is booked on it.RoleBBooking — One person committed to one role for a stretch of weeks, at a percentage of their time. A booking is a plan, not a record of work done.Booking