Doing the work
Due dates, estimates, and logging time
Hours in, hours out — and how to switch time tracking off entirely if you do not want it.
Three separate things, often confused: when it is due, how long you think it will take, and how long it actually took. You can use one, two, all three, or none.
Due dates
A due date is a plain day — due Friday means Friday wherever you are, and it is never shifted by a timezone. Set it on the task, or type it when you create one (the shorthand).
If a specific time matters — a three o'clock call — add one. The time is shown in each reader's own timezone, so a call at 3pm your time reads as 9pm to a colleague in Europe, which is what they need to see.
When something is late. A task is overdue when its due date is before today and it is still open. Today is worked out in your timezone, so people in different places can see a task tip over at different moments; that is deliberate. A task with no due date is never overdue — it is also never a commitment, which is why No due date is a filter worth running now and then.
Overdue work is always marked with an icon and the word — Overdue · 3d — never with colour alone. Work due today or tomorrow gets an amber chip saying which. Everything else is plain text. A task that is done or canceled just shows its date; it is not late, whatever the date says.
Estimates
An estimate is your best guess at how long a task will take, and you type it in hours:
| Type | Means |
|---|---|
1.5 |
one and a half hours |
2h 30m or 2h30m |
two and a half hours |
2:30 |
the same |
90m |
an hour and a half |
0.25h |
fifteen minutes |
We show it back to you the tidy way — 2h, 2.5h, 0.25h, or 2h 5m when it is not a clean
quarter of an hour. There is no rounding to fifteen-minute blocks: if you say seven minutes, we
keep seven minutes.
A parent task shows its own estimate and the total of its subtasks' estimates separately, and never quietly adds them together. If a parent is estimated at 4h and its three subtasks total 6h, you see both numbers — because that difference is usually the interesting part.
Logging time
Time is logged by hand, after the fact. There is no stopwatch to start and no timer to forget.
On a task, the Time panel takes four things:
- Hours — the same formats as an estimate.
- Date — defaults to today, in your timezone. Logging yesterday's work this morning is normal.
- Note — optional. "Call with Acme".
- Who did the work — only offered to admins, who can log time on somebody else's behalf. Members log their own.
An entry can be removed by the person it belongs to and by admins. It cannot be edited yet — remove it and log it again — and every removal is in the task's history.
The panel's heading carries the arithmetic: the estimate, the logged total, and the difference as 2h over (50%) in amber or 1h under in green. No estimate to compare against is what it says when there is nothing to compare against, rather than a misleading zero.
Turning time tracking off
Time tracking is optional, and "optional" means invisible when it is off — not greyed out. When it is off, the estimate field, the log-time panel, and the time totals are simply not there. Nobody is nagged about a number they were never going to fill in.
It can be off for a whole workspace or for a single project, but it is not yet a switch inside the product: tell us and we will set it. Nothing is lost by switching it off and on again; the entries are still there when you come back.