FeatureEvery plan

Phases

An admin-defined set of stages for the whole workspace, capped at twenty. They become the tab row on every project page.

By Updated

Where a task sits in your process: Discovery, Build, Review, whatever your team actually calls them.

The workspace defines one list and every project uses it. That is deliberate, and it is what makes the tab row mean the same thing in every project. Per-project stages would let two projects both have a "Review" that means different things, and then no report across them is worth reading.

Owners and admins manage the list from the workspace settings page, up to twenty phases. Everything about it is below.

All of it happens on one card: Settings, Workspaces, open the workspace, and the phases card sits alongside the tags one. Owners and admins only.

  1. Open the workspace and find the Phases card.

    Members see the same list read-only, with a note saying admins manage it. The controls are hidden rather than shown-and-rejected, so nothing looks broken from the other side.

    Open workspace settings
  2. Add a phase, or click a name to rename it.

    Up to twenty. Renaming is inline, and it follows every task already sitting in that phase rather than stranding them under the old word.

    Two phases cannot share a name, case aside, and you are told which one clashes rather than left guessing.

  3. Move phases up and down into the order you work in.

    This order is the tab order on every project page, so putting Review before Build here changes what every project looks like. That is the point of a workspace-wide list.

  4. Press Save.

    Nothing is saved until you do. The whole card saves at once rather than a row at a time, and Save and Cancel only appear once something is actually different. The tags card next to it saves each change as you make it, so the two behave differently on the same page.

Tip

Because it is one save, you can reorder, rename and add in a single pass and then commit. Cancel puts all of it back.

They keep existing. Removing a phase clears it off every task that referenced it, so those tasks stay exactly where they are and simply stop having a phase.

The save reports how many tasks that touched, which is usually a larger number than people expect, and is the reason it reports it at all.

Watch out

Clearing a phase off tasks is not undoable once saved. Cancel is only good before you commit, and afterwards the only way back is to recreate the phase and re-file the tasks by hand.

A phase is where something is in the process, and a task has exactly one. A tag is what something is about, and a task can have any number. If you find yourself wanting two phases at once, you wanted a tag.

Similar readings

Everything below is in the Happiness Center.

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