Moving off a spreadsheet

Your task list is a spreadsheet, and it is not a bad one. A row per task, a column for who, a column for when, a colour for late. It has worked for two years. And lately it has started to lie: the "who" column says Sandy on a row Sandy handed to Joe in a call, the due dates are the ones from the original plan, and there are three tabs called Acme because nobody was sure which was current.

Nothing is wrong with you. A spreadsheet is a genuinely good task list, right up to a particular moment, and you have just passed it.

What a spreadsheet does well

It is worth being fair about this, because the things it does well are the things to keep.

It is fast. There is no form; you type in a cell. It is flexible; a new column costs nothing. Everything is on one screen and you can sort it any way you like. And it is honest in one important way — it holds exactly what you typed and nothing more, so it never pretends to know something it was not told.

Any tool you move to has to keep the first of those. If adding a task takes longer than typing a row, you will drift back to the spreadsheet within a month, and you will be right to.

When it stops

The spreadsheet stops at the second person and the second client, and it stops for the same reason both times: it has no idea what happened.

A cell holds a value, not a change. When the due date moves from Friday to the following Wednesday, the spreadsheet shows Wednesday and forgets there was ever a Friday, who moved it, or why. When Sandy hands a task to Joe in a call, the cell still says Sandy until someone remembers to retype it. When the client asks what is late on their project, somebody has to filter the sheet by hand, screenshot it, and hope the colours are up to date. And the conversation about each task — the actual work — is in an email thread the sheet cannot see.

At one person and one client, you remember all of that yourself. At two and two, nobody does, and the sheet becomes a record of what somebody last typed rather than of what is true.

What to carry across

Not the spreadsheet. The habits.

The row stays a row. In sjTasks, adding a task is one line in one box: Write the homepage copy @sandy friday ~3h. Owner, due date and estimate come out of what you typed; what is left is the title. It is as fast as a cell and it reads back to you before you press Enter.

Sorting stays sorting. The Tasks table is every task you can see, in columns you can sort by clicking. Filters along the top do what your column filters did — status, project, person, date, priority — and the difference is that the filtered list is an address you can paste into an email. Overdue in Acme is a link, not a screenshot.

The colour for late becomes a word. Late work says Overdue · 3d with an icon, worked out in your own timezone each morning, and never depends on someone remembering to update a cell.

And the thing the sheet never had: history. Every change to a task — who moved the date, from what, to what, when — is written down automatically and cannot be edited. The conversation about the task lives on the task as notes, with the files beside it. When the client asks what happened, the answer is on the page.

Moving the rows

Do it in an afternoon, and do it by hand rather than importing. That sounds slower. It is not, because most of the rows should not come across at all.

Open the sheet, sort by status, and start with what is actually open. For each row, ask whether it is one thing one person can finish. If it is, type it — one line, with the owner and the date. If it says and, it is two lines — compound tasks are how work gets lost. If it is the name of a whole piece of client work, it is a project (subtask or new project? draws that line), and its rows are that project's tasks. If nobody can remember why it is there, leave it behind; a task nobody has thought about in three months was not a task, it was a worry.

Then invite the people. Members for your team; a guest for each client, scoped to their own project, free and uncounted. The three tabs called Acme become one project called Acme, with Acme's marketing lead reading it directly, and the "current version" question goes away because there is one.

The one thing to keep

Keep the spreadsheet. Do not delete it; just stop editing it. Your whole team comes out of sjTasks as an export whenever you ask, so you are never further from a spreadsheet than one request — but after a month you will find you have not asked.

The question this answers

The sheet's colour column was trying to answer one question, and now it is a list.

Show me what matters most right now — everything open that somebody said was high or urgent, across every client, with nobody updating a cell.