Tasks

A task is a piece of planned work: a ticket, a product enhancement, a step in an internal process. Tasks are what you log time against when you are moving a project towards a goal. Time that moves no deliverable forward, such as meetings, belongs elsewhere; see Work, Overhead and Flow.

In AbleTime, a task moves forward as work happens. You don't drag it from column to column: logging time against it starts it, and you finish it once the work is logged. Everything about a single task, and every action on it, is in the Task Panel.

What a task holds

• Title and Category, which every task needs. The category says what kind of work it is; see Categories.

• Description, in rich text, with images and PDFs dropped straight in and references to other tasks.

• Assignee, the person who owns it.

• Est. Hours, the time you expect it to take. AbleTime measures logged time against it.

• Priority: Low, Medium, High or Critical.

• Tags, chosen from your organization's tags; see Tags.

• Epic, the larger body of work it belongs to, when Epics are turned on; see Epics.

• External Reference, a link to the same work in another system, such as a Jira ticket.

• Start and end dates, which the Task Panel shows once the task has them. See Timeline for scheduling.

Each task also gets a reference made from the project's prefix and a number, such as AP-12. You use the reference to find the task and to mention it in comments and descriptions.

Creating a task

1. Click + Task in the Project Manager toolbar. You can also create a task from an Epic's page, where the Epic is filled in for you, or from the Time Entry Form, where the task is assigned to you.

2. In Create Task, give it a Title and choose its Category.

3. Fill in whatever else you know: Description, Assignee, Epic, Est. Hours, Priority and tags. Expand External Reference to link it to another system.

4. Choose where it starts: Todo, or, when the Backlog setting is on, Backlog or one of its stages. A task in a backlog Epic starts in backlog, and a task in an active Epic starts in todo.

5. Click Save.

Editing a task

Click Edit in the Task Panel, or the pencil on the task's row in the Ledger, to open Edit Task. You can change everything you set when you created it. Once time has been logged against a task, its category is fixed.

Where a task stands is not changed here. It moves with the actions in the Task Panel, described below.

How a task moves

A task is always in one of these states:

• Backlog: work you have captured but not committed to. It appears only when the Backlog setting is on; see Backlog.

• Todo: work committed to and waiting to start.

• Doing: work under way.

• Done: work finished.

• Archived: taken out of the active views, from any state.

Backlog and doing can also have stages, the steps a task passes through within that state, such as "In Progress", "Testing" and "Ready for Launch". You move a task between stages with Transition To in the Task Panel; see Lanes.

Logging time against a todo task moves it to doing, and time logged against a backlog task can move it straight to doing. A task in doing with time on it moves to done when you choose Mark as Done in the Task Panel, or when you turn on Close Task as you save a time entry for it. Move to To-Do and Move to Backlog move a task between backlog and todo before work starts.

Owners, admins and managers can Reopen a done task, which returns it to doing, and Unarchive an archived one, which returns it to doing if it has time logged and to todo if it has none.

Finishing a task without its own time

Sometimes the work for a task is logged against another task in the same project. Rather than leave it open, close it by the task that carried the work: choose Close in the Task Panel, pick that task under Closed By, and add a note. The task moves to done, and the note is kept as a comment. The steps are on Task Panel.

Deleting a task

A task in backlog or todo with no time logged can be deleted from the Task Panel. Deleting cannot be undone. If the work was done under another task, close it instead, so the record shows where the work went.

Where to go next

Every part of a single task, from its comments and work log to blocking and its history, is on Task Panel. Chains of tasks that wait on each other are on Dependencies, and splitting one task in two or merging two into one is on Splitting and Merging Tasks.