Doing the work
Adding tasks fast
One line, one task — the shorthand for owner, priority, estimate, date, and labels.
The quickest way to create a task is to type the whole thing into one box:
Fix the nav @jane !high ~2h friday
That makes a task called Fix the nav, assigned to Jane, priority High, estimated at two hours, due this coming Friday. The bits it understood come out of the title; what is left is the title.
You will find the box at the top of the Projects page (with a picker for which project), at the top of any project page, and behind Add a task on the Tasks page. A preview underneath shows what it read before you press Enter, so nothing is a surprise.
Nothing here is required. Type a plain sentence and you get a plain task. The shorthand is there when you already know the details, not a form you have to fill in.
The shorthand
| Type this | And you get |
|---|---|
@jane |
assigned to Jane. @me means you |
!urgent !high !medium !low !someday |
the priority. !med, !sd and !some-day also work, and case does not matter |
~2h ~90m ~1.5h ~2h30m ~2:30 ~0.25h ~2 |
an estimate. A bare number is hours — ~2 is two hours |
#billable |
a label your workspace already has. Use as many as you like |
today tomorrow tmrw |
a due date |
friday fri |
the next Friday after today. On a Friday, friday means next week's |
next week |
the first day of next week |
next monday next fri |
that weekday, inside next week |
eow eom |
the last day of this week / this month |
in 3 days in 2 weeks |
counted from today |
aug 30 30 aug aug 30 2027 |
a specific day. No year means this year, rolled forward if it has already passed |
8/30 8/30/2027 |
month/day |
2026-08-30 |
year-month-day |
friday 3pm aug 30 at 15:00 |
a date and a specific time |
due friday by aug 30 on 8/30 |
the same dates, if you prefer words in front of them |
"anything in quotes" |
left exactly as typed, never read as shorthand |
Weeks start on the day your workspace says they do, and every date resolves in your timezone.
Rules worth knowing
First one wins. A task has one owner, one priority, one estimate, one due date. If you type two, the first is used and the second stays in the title — with a note telling you so. Labels are the exception: you can have as many as you like.
Nothing disappears silently. Anything the box could not use stays in the title, and anything it deliberately ignored comes back as a short warning under the box: "Ignored extra assignee @bob; a task has one assignee." If you type a date that has already passed, it is accepted, and you are told.
on is only eaten with a date. "Follow up on the invoice" keeps its on, because the
invoice is not a date. The words due, by, and on are only consumed when a real date
follows them.
Quotes protect text. Anything inside double quotes is never read as shorthand, which is how
you get a task actually called Ask about the ~2h estimate.
Zero is not an estimate. ~0h is refused with a note rather than stored as nothing.
A label you have not made yet gets made. Type #billable and, if your workspace has no such
label, sjTasks creates it and says so: "Created the label #billable and put it on this task."
Typing a word is how you decide it matters, so nothing is thrown away. Guests are the exception —
they cannot create labels, so theirs is left off with a note asking an admin to add it. Team
admins can rename, recolour and remove labels under Team settings → Labels.