Due dates, estimates, and logging time

Due dates, estimates and hours logged: how the three differ, how to read the hours back, and how to switch time tracking off entirely.

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 — click the date in the task's Details and it becomes a date box; the task says Saved when you leave it — or click the date on the task's row in a project or on the Tasks page, 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.

Tasks that come back

Some work is never finished, only finished for now: the Monday status note, the monthly invoice run, the yearly renewal. Set it to repeat and it comes back on its own.

In the task's Details, click Repeats and pick one of six: every day, every weekday, every week, every 2 weeks, every month, every year. Or type it when you add the task — Send the status note @me every week friday (the shorthand).

Once a rule is chosen, a second choice appears — and for most tasks the default is right:

From when it is due (the default) — a fixed schedule. Finish Friday's note on Saturday and the next one is still due next Friday.
From when it is finished — a rolling one. "Back up the laptop every week" wants the next date counted from the day you actually did it, not the day you meant to.

What happens when you finish one. The task you marked done stays done — it keeps its notes, its files, its logged time and its place in every report of finished work. A new task comes back in its place with the next date, the same title, description, project, list, owner, priority, estimate, tags and watchers, and fresh open copies of its subtasks. The two are linked: the new one says Came back from acme-142, and the history on both records it. Rows and board cards that repeat carry a small ↻.

The arithmetic is deliberately dull. Every month keeps the day of the month and uses the last day when a month is shorter (the 31st becomes the 28th in February). Every weekday skips Saturday and Sunday. A due time carries over — a 3pm call every week is still at 3pm. Dates are worked out in your team's timezone, because a schedule is shared. A repeating task with no due date counts from the day you finish it.

Reopening a finished one. Marking a repeater done again after reopening it does not bring back a second copy: the next one is already there, and finishing the same week twice is a correction rather than another week. A repeater in an archived project is simply finished, with nothing to come back into. Anyone who has since left the project, or become a guest, is not carried onto the next copy.

Stopping it. Set Repeats back to Does not repeat on the task that is currently open, and nothing more comes back. Cancel the first task in the series and the whole series stops, whatever later copies say. Changing the rule on a task changes that task only — the next copy inherits whatever the rule is when you finish — so there is no "apply to all" question to answer.

Nothing comes back until you finish the one you have. If a weekly task sits open for three weeks, you have one overdue task, not three.

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.

Correcting an entry

Typed 1.5 when it was 2.5, or put Tuesday's call on Wednesday? Beside each entry in the Time panel there is Edit: the row turns into its three fields — hours, date, note — and Save puts it right. Emptying the note box takes the note off. What never changes is who did the work: an entry on the wrong person is deleted and logged again, so the history says so.

An entry can be edited and removed by the person it belongs to and by admins. Every correction and every removal is in the task's history, with what it was and what it became: changed a 1.5h entry to 2.5h, moved a 2h entry to Tue 2 Sep.

Both are refused while time tracking is off for the project: a switched-off feature is not a place to keep changing numbers nobody can see. Turn it back on first.

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.

Billable hours

Whether work is billable is a switch of its own, Billable, in Team settings → Features, off until an admin turns it on. With it on, every task has a Billable row, yes or no. Its hours follow it: log an hour on a billable task and the hour is billable. For the odd hour that is not — the call you will not charge for — open Edit on the entry and set Billable to No; As the task puts it back.

Reading the hours back

Hours logged — under the Frequently used card on the dashboard, and at the foot of any task's Time panel — is the report: everything logged in the team, by person and by project, over a window of days. Pick the period (this month is the default, because the question is usually "what do I bill"), or any two dates; narrow to one project, one person or one tag; the address carries all of it, so last month on Acme is a link you can keep. Under the summary is every entry with its date, task and note, so "what was the 3.5 hours on the 14th" has an answer. Download as CSV gives you both blocks in one file for whoever writes the invoice.

Between the two sits Against the estimate — the question an estimate exists to answer. Every task worked on in the window is listed with its estimate, everything ever logged on it, and the difference as hours and as a percentage, furthest over first: +1.5h (30% over). The line at the top totals the tasks that have an estimate — 4 tasks estimated at 12h, 15.5h logged — +3.5h (29% over) — so "are we over on Acme" is one glance. A task with no estimate is listed and left out of the total; put one on it and it joins. The CSV carries the block too.

Billable appears while your team has Billable on: the window's hours split into billable and not, each hour counted by its own answer or else its task's. Press Billable to narrow the whole report to the billable hours — the address says billable=yes, so billable hours last month is a link — or Not billable for the rest. The CSV carries the split, and a Billable column on every entry.

By tag appears once any task in the window carries a tag: each tag's hours, with Everything else beside them, so #design against the rest is one row. Hours on tasks with no tag are the No tag row, and an hour on a task with two tags counts under both. Press a tag to narrow the whole report to it. The CSV carries this block too.

Admins see the whole team. A member sees the projects they are on — everybody's hours on them. Guests do not see it at all: they see the work, not what it cost.

Logging time and reading it back this way are both on every plan, Free included. See Plans and billing.

Turning time tracking off

Time tracking is optional, and "optional" means out of the way when it is off — not greyed out. When it is off, the estimate field, the log-time panel, and the time totals are not there. In their place a task shows one line saying time tracking is off for this project, with the switch a click away for an admin. Nobody is nagged about a number they were never going to fill in, and nobody is left wondering where the panel went.

It can be off for a whole team or for a single project, and the switch is yours: an admin turns it off or on in Team Settings → Features. A single project can go the other way from its team — on when the team is off, or off when the team is on — from the project's own settings. Nothing is lost by switching it off and on again; the entries are still there when you come back.

The same is true of the other switches on that page. A new team starts with time tracking, subtasks, task lists, watchers and Answers from your work off — a task, a date and a name — and an admin turns on what the team needs. Two switches start on: Tags, and Ask in English, which reads no task, only your question. Off means the controls are not there; anything already made stays visible, and turning a switch back on loses nothing. Everything an admin can set — the team's name, timezone, week start and features — is in Team Settings, and nothing in sjTasks needs us to switch it on for you.