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Managing and Organizing Tasks

Keeping your tasks organized is key to being productive. Instead of spending time hunting for tasks and feeling overwhelmed by the growing backlog, with some organization you can focus your time on completing your highest priority tasks and keeping your backlog under control. HourStack has a default organizational setup designed to help you succeed.

What are Tasks?

Tasks are the core of HourStack. They can represent to-dos, events, or any number of other action items. Tasks help you organize your work, keep track of important details, and plan and track your time.

Tasks will live on either a Project page, your personal My Tasks page, or both if the task is assigned to you and a project. These pages are the primary grouping of your workspace's tasks, and from there you'll utilize task sections for further grouping.

  • Your Projects list can be found in the left sidebar, and each project has its own dedicated task list. This allows you to manage the tasks assigned to your entire team for each project in one convenient location, helping to keep your projects on track. You have the ability to customize your sections and automation rules to fit your team's workflow, so tasks can be moved through the sections based on the progress of the work being done. Learn more in our article about creating and managing projects.
  • The My Tasks page shows you all tasks that have been assigned to you. This gives you an easy way to see all of your work in one place, regardless of what project it belongs to or when you will work on it.

Task Sections

Both Project Tasks and My Tasks pages are comprised of sections, which allow you to group tasks together. On each page, we provide you with a default setup that includes Inbox, Scheduled, In Progress, and Complete sections, but you have the flexibility to create as many or as few sections as you need. You can easily rearrange sections by dragging and dropping, renaming them, deleting them, or even hiding them, to achieve the perfect setup.

The only section that cannot be deleted is your Inbox, but it can be renamed as you please. This is the default section that all new tasks go to and if you’d like, you can delete all other sections and have a single list with no further grouping of tasks.

Task Viewing Options

On tasks pages, you have the option to switch the task view between List View and Board View. You can edit the order of tasks in each section by dragging and dropping task cards into the desired place. Whether you are in list view or board view, both options show you the same tasks and the same order.

In the upper right of your tasks page, you can easily sort, filter, and search your tasks.

Bulk Actions

Bulk actions help you speed up your workflow by allowing you to update multiple tasks at once. To select multiple tasks, use Ctrl+Click on PC or +Click on Mac. Once you have multiple task cards selected, you’ll see them outlined in blue and a bulk options menu will pop up at the bottom of your screen. From this menu you can access the following actions:

  • Set project: change the project to a project you select
  • Set label: add the selected label(s) to all selected tasks
  • Assign to: add the selected member to all selected tasks
  • Set due date: select a due date and/or time
  • Mark as complete: mark all tasks (and the time entries within them) as complete
  • Delete: delete selected tasks

Task Section Automations

Automations help you stay on top of task statuses by automatically moving tasks between sections as work progresses. If you are using the default sections (Inbox, Scheduled, In Progress, Complete), the default set of automations will move tasks to the appropriate section based on whether time entries have been scheduled, started, or completed on the task.

Editing Task Details

Clicking on a task card will open that task in the Task Sidebar. Here, you can see and edit all of the task details, including the total scheduled and logged time, the assigned team member, the project, labels, and due date. Learn more in our article about editing task details.

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