Tasks are one of the most widely used pieces of Planhat! Many of our users spend a lot of their days managing projects and activities, so it's critical to be able to:
Quickly prioritise your day
Escalate when things are blocked
For Teams to understand what is being worked on
This is what the Status field enables.
There are three parts here to know about.
1/ Outcomes
There are two default and non-editable values to represent outcomes of a Task: Done and Ignored (shown in the screenshot above). When you pick either of these, the Task will also get archived (which e.g. hides it from the Task list on Company profiles, and puts it at the bottom of today's stack in the calendar view of the "Calendar" Home feature).
When you set a Task to Done, you also have the chance to log a Note (also shown in the screenshot above). A Note is a type of Conversation, a separate model in Planhat, representing "notes" of things that have happened - logged activities (unlike a Task which represents things that are going to happen - planned activities). If you log a Note from a Task, you will find a reference to that Note on the archived Task.
You have three options (shown in the screenshot above):
Complete and Save:
complete Task, and save a Note in the backgroundComplete and Don't save:
complete Task, and don't save a NoteComplete and Log Note:
complete Task, and open a Note that I can edit before I save it
2/ User preference for "Done" shortcut
Out of these three options, you have the chance to "favourite" one of them, as denoted by a star. This will then be used across the application wherever you see a checkmark, to make it faster for you to close Tasks with your preferred note-taking option.
Of course if you want to use another option, you just open the Status field (as shown above) and select the one you want.
3/ Statuses
Status values are meant to be used for in-progress Tasks, and you have two defaults: In-progress and Blocked (shown in the screenshot above). However, you can customise these yourself by removing, adding values and setting the colour you want.
This is managed from the "Data" Global Tool - select the "Task" model from the list on the left-hand side, ensure the "Fields" tab is selected, and click on the "Status" field - all shown below.
Click the image to view it enlarged