Complexity you switch on

Open most project tools for the first time and the new-task form has eleven fields. Story points. Sprint. Epic. Custom field one, custom field two. Somebody, somewhere, needed each of them, and the price of that is paid by every person on every team who did not — a form to scroll past, a column of blanks, a nagging sense that the task is not "properly" filled in.

A task needs a title, an owner and a date. Everything else is complexity, and complexity should be something you switch on the day you need it, not something you spend the first month switching off.

The default is the plain task

A new team in sjTasks shows you a task, who has it, and when it is due. Type Write the homepage copy @sandy friday into the box and that is what you get. The priority defaults to medium, which is what "I did not say" should mean. Nothing asks you for an estimate. Nothing asks you for a label. The Tasks table has five menus — status, project, people, dates, priority — and no sixth until your team has given it a reason to exist.

Everything below is there, in the product, built. It is just not in your way.

Time tracking: off means invisible

Estimates and logged hours are the example people ask about first. When time tracking is off for a team or for one project, the estimate field, the log-time panel and the totals are not greyed out — they are not there. Nobody is nagged about a number they were never going to fill in, and nobody's task looks "incomplete" for lacking one.

Turn it on for the one project where a client is on a fixed fee and "are we over?" is a question with money in it, and leave it off for the retainer where nobody counts. Today that is something you ask us to set rather than a switch on a settings page; nothing is lost by switching either way, because the entries wait for you. Estimates without a timer is what to do with it once it is on.

Labels: made by typing one

There is no labels setup step. The first time somebody types #billable on a task, the label exists — and the box says so, "Created the label #billable and put it on this task", so it is never a surprise. From then on a Label menu appears in the Tasks table after Priority, because the team now uses labels. Before that moment there is no menu, because there is nothing for it to filter.

Admins tidy them up under Team settings, renaming or removing the ones that were typos. Guests cannot create labels — theirs is left off with a note asking an admin — so a client cannot seed your vocabulary by accident.

Task lists: one until the page is hard to read

Every project starts with one list called Tasks and everything lands there. The moment to add a second is when the page has grown enough to want Design / Build / Launch as headings. Until then there is no picker beside the quick-add box, because there is nothing to pick. Add a list and the picker appears. How to structure a project says when.

Subtasks and watchers: there when a task needs them

Every task can have subtasks, one level deep, each with its own owner and date. Every project has a watcher list. Neither shows up as a demand. A task with no subtasks does not have an empty subtask section asking to be filled; a watcher list you never edit is simply everyone who can see the project, which is the sensible default.

Some Day: hidden, visibly

The one piece of complexity that is on from the start is the parking lot. A task at the Some Day priority sinks to the bottom of every list and is left off the dashboard — behind a switch you can see, Some Day hidden — show it, not behind a rule working quietly. It counts as open, because it is open. It can still go overdue if you give it a date. It is complexity in the honest direction: it takes something out of your way and tells you it did.

Why this matters more than it sounds

Every field on a form is a small tax on every person who fills it in, for ever. A studio of six that logs time on one client's project and none of the others should not be looking at estimate boxes on every task in the other nine. A team that uses no labels should not have a Label menu. The cost of a feature you are not using is not zero, and the way to make it zero is for the feature to be genuinely absent until you ask for it.

The test we hold ourselves to: a new person should be able to add their first task within a minute of signing in and understand everything they see on the screen. Then, on the day they ask "can I estimate this?", the answer is yes, and it was there the whole time.

The question this answers

The parking lot is where the ideas you did not want to lose went to wait. The trick is to look at it once a week and promote the two that matter.

Show me the Some Day backlog — give it five minutes on a Friday. Anything you have not thought about in a month can be canceled without guilt.