Use Worksheets

The Feature Guide

The Feature Guide is an in-depth look at the features for Tasks on the Run. If what you're looking for is a quick overview, try taking the Tour.

Worksheets are a unique Tasks on the Run feature, where you create a skeleton of folders and groups and then use this to manage tasks. Worksheets include several views of the same folder/group arrangement. There is an overview page which is best for tracking time spent on tasks. There are also daily, weekly, and monthly views which are a great way to manage (or monitor) your team's work schedule.

View Folders & Groups as Workstreams

You start a new worksheet by selectively adding some of the folders and groups you are using to organize your tasks. You can create a worksheet that includes groups that cut across multiple folders, or you can create one that shows just one folder.

The Overview page for a worksheet shows all the tasks for your selected folders and groups

In a worksheet, your folders and groups are arranged vertically, and under each group you will see the related tasks. The Overview shows all the related tasks, and includes the estimated and actual time entries as well as group subtotals. On the daily, weekly, and monthly views, the tasks are placed horizontally into columns that represent time periods. So you get a visual picture of what tasks are going to be done on what dates.

The Schedule views show your tasks divided into columns for individual days, weeks, or months

Used in conjunction with worksheets, your task groups can represent high-level goals or workstreams, which might last for an extended period. You can then use tasks as short, easy to estimated units of work that probably only last a few hours.

Work with Live Data that's Never Out of Date

Every task that you see on a worksheet is directly linked to a real task on your website. When you add a task from a worksheet, that task is added to the system like any other task. Conversely, when someone independently updates a task, say by editing a time estimate, you see that change immediately on your worksheet.

On a worksheet you can edit everything to do with tasks from one integrated interface. And because worksheets always use live data, schedule changes made in a worksheet flow down into the tasking data, and changes to tasks on the front line flow back up into your worksheet.

Putting Round-Trip Scheduling to Work

The benefit of working with live data on your worksheets is that you can smoothly shift back and forth between the worksheets, which you use to see the big picture, and the task-management tools which you use to track details.

To show how this can make both activities more effective, imagine gathering people into a conference room, putting a new worksheet up on a big screen, and starting to task out your next phase of work. This way, as you and your team add each new task on the worksheet, you can drill down and flesh out the information on them. You can click on a new task, add to the description, add time estimates, and assign it to someone.

As you add time estimates to the tasks on your worksheet, you can see running totals for the time required for each group. You can then toggle individual tasks forward or backwards in time, to reflect depencies as well as the amount of work that can be done in a given time period.

When you're finished sketching out an initial plan, you don't have to do anything more for your team to get started. You don't have the extra work of, for example translating the information from a whiteboard full of yellow sticky labels. All your tasking information is already captured.

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