Task timeline
The Timeline plots your team's open tasks on the date they are due, across the next sixty days. It lets you see at a glance what is overdue, what is due this week and where the schedule is crowded, which the Activities list does not show well because it is linear.
The Activities list answers the question what do I do right now. It answers the question how does my week look badly. The Timeline exists for that second question: it spreads open tasks across a ruler of dates, and the shape tells the story before you read a single name.
How to open it
- In the menu, open Activities.
- In the top right corner, click Timeline.
- To go back, use Back to activities, in the same corner.
How to read the chart
- Each row is a task. The subject sits on the left and, after the middle dot, the name of the related record.
- The colored tag marks the due date on the ruler. Blue is a task still within its deadline, red is an overdue task.
- The gray vertical line is today. Everything to its left is already past due.
- The five dates along the top are the ruler's marks, from the start to the end of the period shown.
- Clicking the subject opens the related record. If the task has no record, the click takes you back to Activities.
What is included and what is not
- Open tasks for the whole team are included, not just yours.
- Only tasks with a due date are included. A task with no date has nowhere to be drawn, so it stays out.
- Only due dates within the next sixty days are included. Anything due after that does not appear.
- Completed tasks disappear from the screen as soon as they are checked off.
- If nothing matches these criteria, the screen shows No tasks due in this period.
Example: On Monday morning, the coordinator at Aurora Accounting opened the Timeline and saw seven red tags to the left of today's line, all belonging to the same analyst, plus a block of twelve blue tags on Thursday. She reassigned four overdue tasks and pushed three from Thursday to the following Monday. The screen was flat in five minutes.
Permissions and limits
- You see the tasks your role can already see in the Activities list. The Timeline does not widen access.
- The screen is read only: you cannot drag a tag to change its date. To postpone, open the task under Activities and use Snooze, or edit the Due date.
- Each task is a point on the date it is due, not a duration bar. There is no percentage of completion.
- On a phone, the chart scrolls horizontally so the dates do not pile up.
Common questions
- My task vanished from the timeline, was it deleted? It was most likely completed, or its due date was pushed beyond sixty days.
- Can I filter by owner? Not on this screen. Use the Activities filters and come back afterwards.
- Is it good for tracking a project with chained phases? For that, use Projects, which has boards, subitems and dependencies between items.