Kanban board + timeline

I’ve been experimenting with the new timeline and wanted to share something I’ve been trying in case people find it interesting:

  • I have tasks represent projects. e.g. “Update PPT” in a category project e.g. “Products”.
  • I break down this task into smaller tasks within the main project (not subtasks).
  • I add these tasks to my Kanban board to show the current number of projects in progress.
  • I build a timeline and the main “project” task shows as green as it inherits this colour from the Kanban board. This way, I can see the duration of the “project” as a whole" within my “products” project.
  • The main reason for doing this is to see how “projects” (tasks) in “Products” flow from one to the next and I can see all the actual tasks underneath.

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This is fantastic! What a great suggestion. I know that this would help me personally in my use of Timeline, so I love seeing this. Thanks, @paulminors!

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@paulminors,

Clever way to take the timeline function and give it some extra juice.

This topic got me thinking about timeline a little harder and I started playing around on Asana. I found out if you add due dates to a section it will show up in the timeline. Without a due date a section isn’t listed in unscheduled tasks, but with a due date it will be displayed in the timeline.
With that you can extend your idea and display start and end date for project sections in a timeline, and arrange all the tasks in a timeline under their associated section.
But since this appears to be an undocumented feature, I have to assume you use it at the risk that behavior may change.

If Asana added a start date to Projects, this could be used to provide even more timeline functionality, along the same lines of what you are suggesting.
Take that one step further and map all Project start and due dates from ones dashboard on a dashboard timeline, then you have an improved dashboard too.

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+1 for adding a Start Date to projects!

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Projects have a start date now.

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