Doing the work
Notes on tasks
The discussion, kept where the work is — how to write one, edit one, and what happens to it.
A note is what you would otherwise have emailed. It lives on the task, so the next person to pick the work up reads the reasoning without you having to forward a thread.
Notes are on every task, in a panel called Notes.
Writing one
The box sits at the top of the panel and is always open — there is no Add a note button to find first. Type, press Add note. The thread underneath reads newest first, so coming back to a long discussion costs no scrolling.
Markdown works. Not the whole encyclopedia, but everything you actually use:
**bold** and *italic*
- a list
- another item
`ACME-142` for a reference
> a quotation
[a link](https://example.com)
Anything that looks like markup but is not is shown as the text you typed rather than acted on, so you can safely paste anything into a note.
Editing and removing
Your own notes have Edit and Delete beside them. An edited note says it was edited. Deleting asks first, because a note is somebody's reasoning and losing it by mis-click would be irritating.
Admins can edit and delete anyone's note — for taking out the phone number that should not have been pasted in, not for rewriting history. Every one of these is recorded.
Who writes notes
Everyone who can see the task, including guests. That is the whole point of the guest role: a client can read the work and write on it, but cannot change it. If you have invited a client into a project, notes are how they talk to you inside sjTasks rather than in your inbox.
Finding the conversation
The task table on a project page has a Notes column showing how many notes each task has, so you can see where the discussion is happening without opening anything.
Writing a note puts you on that task's watcher list, so you hear about what is said back. If you would rather not, Stop watching this task is in the task's sidebar — see Watchers.
Notes on the project itself, separate from any one task, are not built yet — for now, put project-wide thinking on a task in that project.
What to put in a note, and what not to
Put in a note: decisions and why, what the client said, what you tried, what you are waiting for.
Do not put in a note: the due date, the owner, or the priority. Those are fields — they are filterable and reportable, and a note saying "this is urgent" is invisible to every report in the product. If a task is blocked, set its status to Blocked and write the reason as a note. The status is what shows up in a list; the note is what explains it.