Getting started
What sjTasks is
The shape of the whole product in five minutes — workspaces, projects, tasks, and what hangs off them.
sjTasks keeps track of work: what needs doing, who is doing it, when it is due, and how it is going. It is built around the task. Everything else — files, notes, time — hangs off a task or the project it lives in, rather than off a conversation you have to scroll back through.
If you read one page, read this one. The rest of the guide is detail.
The four things
Your workspace is everything you can see when you sign in: your people, your projects, your files. Most people only ever have one. If you belong to more than one — say you run your own work and a client has invited you into theirs — you switch between them from the menu with your workspace name in it, at the top right. Nothing crosses between workspaces.
A project is a body of work someone will ask "how's it going?" about: a client, a product, a push. It has its own page, its own watchers, its own files, and a progress line that reads 12 of 20 tasks done. Every workspace starts with one project called General, so you never have to invent a project before you can write down a to-do.
A task is one thing one person can finish. It has an owner, a priority, a due date, an
estimate, and a reference like ACME-142 that you can say out loud in a meeting or paste into
an email. Most of what you type into sjTasks will be tasks.
A subtask is a piece of a task that needs its own owner or its own date. Subtasks are real tasks — same reference, same everything — that happen to live under a parent. They go one level deep, on purpose.
Which to reach for is its own page: Projects, task lists, tasks, and subtasks.
What hangs off a task
| On a task | What it is for |
|---|---|
| Notes | The discussion. What you would have emailed, kept where the work is |
| Files | Attachments — a brief, a screenshot, a signed contract |
| Time | An estimate up front, hours logged as they go. Entirely optional |
| Watchers | Who hears about it, inherited from the project |
| History | Who changed what, and when. Written automatically, never edited |
The reference: ACME-142
Every project has a short key — ACME — and every task in it gets a number. Together they
make a reference you can use anywhere: "ACME-142 is blocked on the client."
Two things worth knowing. References are never reused, so a link in an old email never
quietly resolves to a different task. And if you rename a project's key, the old references keep
working — permanently. Type ACME-142 into the search box at the top of any page and you land on
the task.
Where things are
- Dashboard — your work: what is overdue, what is due today, what you have not started, and the questions you keep one click away.
- Projects — every project you can see, with progress and open counts.
- Tasks — every task you can see, as a table you can sort, filter, edit in bulk, and send as a link.
- Docs — this guide.
- Search — the box in the middle of the top bar. Tasks, projects, and references. Press
/. - The bell — what changed on the work you follow.
Under your name at the top right: Profile, and Notifications for choosing what we send you. Under your workspace's name: Team Settings, where people are invited.
What sjTasks deliberately does not do
Being clear about this saves you looking for it. There are no Gantt charts, no task dependencies beyond one subtask blocking its parent, no recurring tasks, no running timers (you log hours, you do not start a stopwatch), and no custom fields.
And there is no delete button anywhere. Work that will not happen is canceled; a project that is finished is archived. Both keep the record and both are reversible.
The full and honest list of what is not here yet is What is not built yet.