What a task is

You know the feeling. The list has forty things on it, half of them have been there for a month, and the one at the top says Redesign the site. Nobody is doing it. Nobody could be. It is not that the team is lazy; it is that nobody wrote down a thing a person could actually start on a Tuesday morning.

Most task lists fail for the same reason, and it is not the software. It is that the things on them are not tasks.

The three-part test

A task is one unit of work that one person can finish. That gives you a test with three parts, and a line on your list has to pass all three.

One unit of work. You can picture what "done" looks like before you start. Write the homepage copy is done when there is homepage copy. Redesign the site is done when — when what? When the client stops sending notes? A thing whose finish line you cannot describe is not a task; it is a hope.

One owner. Somebody's name is on it, and only one somebody. Two names on a task means each of them assumes the other has it, and the task quietly belongs to nobody. If the work genuinely needs two people, it is two tasks, or it is one task with a hand-off inside it — which is what subtasks are for.

One due date. A day by which it will be finished, or an honest blank. Not "soon", not "this quarter", not a date somebody typed in to make the field stop being red. A blank due date is better than a false one, because a blank is something you can search for and fix.

An example from an agency

Say you run a small studio and Acme has asked for a new website. Redesign the Acme site goes on the list, with Sandy's name on it, due at the end of the month. Three weeks later it is still there, and nobody can say whether it is a third done or nearly done.

Now write down what is actually going to happen instead:

• Kick-off call with Acme — Joe, Tuesday.
• Write the homepage copy — Sandy, next Friday.
• Design the homepage — Joe, the Friday after, and it cannot start until the copy is in.
• Send Acme the design for review — Sandy, the Monday after that.

Four tasks. Each one has a person, a day, and a finish line anyone in the room could recognise. On any given morning you can say which of them is late, which is next, and who is carrying the most. Redesign the Acme site could never tell you that, because it was never a task. It was the name of a project.

What a task carries

In sjTasks a task has exactly the things the three-part test needs and not much more: a title, one owner, a priority, a due date, and an estimate if you want one. It gets a reference like acme-142 that you can say in a meeting or paste into an email. Notes, files and logged hours hang off it, so the conversation about the work sits with the work rather than in somebody's inbox.

There is deliberately no field for "which of these three people is roughly responsible", and no way to give a task two due dates. Those gaps are the product being on your side. When you type Write the homepage copy @sandy friday into the box at the top of a project, you get a task with an owner and a date, and the day you look at the list it will be either done or not.

The two mistakes to watch for

The first is a title with and in it. Write the copy and design the page is two tasks wearing one line, and it will be half-finished forever. There is a whole piece on that: Compound tasks are how work gets lost.

The second is a task that is really a project — a body of work somebody will ask "how is it going?" about. Redesign the Acme site is one of those. It deserves its own page, its own watchers and its own progress line, which is what a project is for. Subtask or new project? draws the line.

The question this answers

Once every line is a task with an owner, one question becomes easy to ask and impossible to dodge: what is open right now with nobody's name on it?

Show me the open work with no owner — it is one of the eight standard questions every team starts with, and it is the list to read before you add anything new.