Subtasks & checklists
Break work down two ways, and why checklists decide your Timeline lane.
Big tasks split into smaller pieces two ways, and they aren't the same thing:
- Subtasks are full tasks nested under a parent - each has its own owner, dates and status.
- Checklists are tick-boxes inside a task, for the steps that don't need a status of their own. They *can* carry a person and their own dates.
Working a checklist
- Add a list from the Checklists section, name it, then add items.
- Click an item's text to edit it in place - Enter saves, Shift+Enter adds a line, Escape abandons.
- Items can be assigned to a person individually and ticked off.
- Adding, editing, assigning, completing or deleting an item notifies watchers and assignees, and shows in the task's activity.
Dates on an item
A checklist item can carry a start date and a due date of its own. Once an item has a date, the chip is always on the row. On an item with no date the control appears when you hover or focus the row, so an undated list stays quiet - and on a touchscreen, where there is no hover, it is always there.
Subtasks take dates the same way, through the same control - a subtask is a task, so its dates are the task's own start and due date rather than a third kind of date.
Noots marks it rather than refusing it. A task's due date can be moved by something other than you - a task due *at* a milestone follows that milestone when the milestone moves - so refusing the item would make one object un-editable because somebody edited another. Move one of an item's own two dates past the other and the one you moved wins and the other follows it; the only thing refused outright is setting both at once so that the start is after the due date, which is a contradiction rather than a drag.
Per-milestone checklists
If a task has milestones, its checklists are grouped under them - a Whole task group plus one group per milestone. Adding a list inside a milestone group scopes it to that milestone automatically.
The Timeline measures how much of a milestone's checklist is done against how much of the runway to that milestone has been spent. Give a milestone its own checklist and the task starts tracking its own schedule health - with no checklist there is nothing to pace against, and the task simply sits in In Progress.
Rule of thumb: if a step needs its own status - somebody moving it across the board, its own comments, its own files - make it a subtask. If it is a step to tick off, make it a checklist item, give it a date and an owner if it needs them, and put it under the milestone it belongs to.