Tasks, and the one status people never use
Tasks assigned by your programme and tasks you set your own team, the five states one can be in, and why Blocked is the most useful and least used of them.
What you will learn
- Where tasks come from, and why that matters
- The five states, and when each is the honest one
- How to break a big task down
- The three views worth checking weekly
Two sources, one list#
Tasks either come from your incubation programme - something the centre needs from you - or from inside your own team. They live in the same place, which is the point: the work your programme expects is not in a separate system you forget to open.
The five states#
| State | When it is the honest one |
|---|---|
| Pending | Not started. |
| In progress | Somebody is actually working on it. |
| In review | Done, waiting on somebody to check it. |
| Blocked | Cannot proceed. Something or someone else is in the way. |
| Completed | Finished. |
Blocked is the one that earns its keep
Most teams leave a stuck task In progress because Blocked feels like an admission. It is the opposite - a task sitting In progress for three weeks tells nobody anything, and a Blocked one tells your programme manager exactly where to help. Use it.
Breaking work down#
A task can carry subtasks, which you can tick off individually and reorder as the sequence becomes clearer. Worth using for anything that would otherwise sit at In progress for a fortnight - the parent task stops being a black box and progress is visible without anyone asking.
Working on it together#
- Assign a task to somebody on your team
- Comment on it, so the discussion sits with the work rather than in a chat thread
- Attach files to the task itself
- See who is on the team and available to take something
The three views worth checking weekly#
- My tasks - what is on you specifically
- Overdue - the one that matters, and the one people avoid opening
- Created by me - what you have handed to other people and whether it moved
Tip
There are statistics too. They are more useful for a conversation with your programme manager than for running your week - the three views above are what actually change what you do on Monday.
