Managing tasks
Task fields, statuses, priorities, estimates, skills and attachments — plus automatic allocation by skill.
Tasks live inside phases. They are the unit of daily work, and deliberately not the unit that controls progression — that is gate criteria.
Creating tasks
Add a task from inside a phase, or from the project view. A task needs only a title to exist; everything else can be filled in later, inline, without opening a form.
Fields
TitletextRequiredWhat has to be done. Short and specific.
Descriptionrich textThe detail. Supports formatting, mentions and emoji.
Statusnot started | in progress | blocked | review | completedWhere the work is. Blocked is worth using honestly — it is what the portfolio blocker views key off.
Prioritylow | medium | high | criticalHow urgent it is relative to everything else in the phase.
Assigneeteam memberOne person, or one agent. Assigning notifies them.
DeadlinedateWhen it is due. Drives sorting on personal task lists and the deadline warnings on the project views.
Estimated hoursnumberEffort, not duration. Feeds the workload charts on the portfolio dashboard.
SkillslistCapabilities the task needs — Regulatory, Packaging, Formulation. Used by automatic allocation.
Inline editing
Almost every field can be changed from the task row without opening it. When a status or priority selector is open, single keys commit a value:
| Key | Status | Key | Priority | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
n | Not started | l | Low | |
p | In progress | m | Medium | |
b | Blocked | h | High | |
r | Review | c | Critical | |
c | Completed |
Clicking a task anywhere in the app opens it in a sheet over the current page, so you keep your place. Opening its URL directly gives the full page.
Automatic allocation
A project can allocate its unassigned work in one action. cadence. looks at every unassigned, not-started task in the project, compares the skills each task requires against the skills of the project team, and assigns each to the best match while spreading load across people.
It only touches tasks that are unassigned and not yet started, so it is safe to run on a project already in flight. It will not move work away from someone who has already picked it up.
Allocation is only as good as your skills data — see team and roles.
Attachments
Tasks take file attachments: specs, test reports, artwork proofs. Files are uploaded to your workspace's storage and listed on the task with their size and type. Deleting an attachment removes the stored file too.
Systems integrating over the API can attach a link rather than a file — see POST /tasks/:id/attachments/link.
Deleting
Deleting a task removes its comments, reactions, attachments and dependency links. As everywhere else in cadence., the confirmation dialog is the only undo.