Tasks & Productivity

Tasks

Overview

Every task belongs to a project, and carries a type you choose the moment you create it:

• Individual task — one person completes it, and it's archived when done.
• Team task — several people work together on the same thing.
• Pipeline task — it moves through stages, each stage with its own team.

In a pipeline task, each stage:

• Has an owner: a team, a default assignee, or both — and a stage with no team stays in a general pool.
• Has a status: In progress · Submitted for approval · Done · Returned — and a stage whose turn hasn't come stays Waiting until the one before it closes.
• Has its own description, checklist, attachments and comments, independent of the parent task, and keeps its own note history and timestamps.

Where to open it: from the HR workspace open the Work row → the Tasks tab. The row opens on Tasks first, so it's the first tab, before Projects and then Work orders (that last one is Professional and above, so if you don't have it you'll see two tabs, not three). An employee opens tasks from their own My tasks row, and anyone granted Assign tasks or Approve tasks gets a second row below it — in the Admin group under their personal rows — called All tasks, and that one alone carries the print button.

Task views

Tasks shows your work four different ways on the desktop. To switch between them:

1. Open Tasks from the Work row.
2. From the tab strip at the top of the page, press the view you want: Today · Board · List · Timeline.
3. Your choice is saved in the URL, and the search and project filters apply to every view equally.

Beside the view strip is a second, independent strip — the scope of the tasks shown: All tasks · My tasks · Archive. The view decides how tasks are seen; the scope decides which. Inside Archive, only List and Timeline work.

Today

Your day's starting point: it shows your own unfinished tasks, split into four sections — Overdue, then Due today, then In progress, then On your list — with a count beside each heading.

Board

A board of columns, each column a task status, with a count at the top of each showing how many are inside. To use it:

1. Drag the card from its column and drop it in the one you want — this changes the task's status.
2. When you pick a single project from the project list, the board shows that project's columns, and a Customize statuses button appears to edit them.
3. When the filter is left on All projects, the board shows the company's default columns, and tasks with customised statuses land in the closest matching column.

List

A dense table view of every task, good for scanning and sorting quickly. It also allows grouping with the Group button: No grouping, Status or Priority — plus the project's custom fields when you pick a single project. The button appears only in this view, and never inside Archive.

Timeline

A horizontal time view drawing each task as a bar on a date axis, with curved lines joining dependent tasks — a task that depends on another shows connected to it. You can drag the bar itself to reschedule the task — except the bar of a completed task or a pipeline task, where pressing opens the task instead of moving it.

For the administrator and project lead

Creating a task

1. Open Tasks from the Work row. (If the company has no project yet, you'll see "Create a project first" — a task doesn't live outside a project.)
2. Press Add task.
3. Choose the type first. The dialog asks "What kind of task is this?" and shows three cards: Individual task · Team task · Pipeline task. None of the other fields appears until you choose.
4. Fill in the shared fields:
   • Project.
   • Title — the only required one — and Description.
   • Priority: Low, Medium (the default), High, Urgent.
   • Due — opens the Duwam calendar, and accepts a time with the date.
   • Estimate (h) — the estimated hours, compared later against the actual.
5. Then the fields particular to the type:
   • Individual: Assignee and Reviewer.
   • Team: an Assignees list of checkboxes — at least one is required.
   • Pipeline: a Pipeline picker. Duwam shows you ready-made templates for your line of business, along with Browse other types and Build it yourself (no template). Once chosen, the stages are presented one by one for you to name and give each its team, default assignee and expected duration.
6. Press Create.

Importing ready-made tasks

Beside Add task is an Import button that builds your tasks from a spreadsheet instead of typing them one by one:

1. Press Import, choose the project, then paste CSV text or press Choose a file. (It accepts a file exported from ClickUp, Trello, Asana or any spreadsheet.)
2. Press Analyse. A column mapping screen appears with an automatic mapping you can adjust, plus a sample of your file's rows — and the title is the only column that must be mapped.
3. Press the Import button carrying the row count, and the operation ends on an Import complete screen telling you how many tasks went in, how many rows were skipped for having no title, and how many assignee names went unmatched.

Approving a stage

When the responsible team submits its stage, the stage card carries an awaiting approval badge and its buttons appear for you:

1. Open the task (from the task list or from the notification).
2. Review the output (attachments, comments, checklist).
3. Choose:
   • Approve stage → the stage closes and the next opens for its team, and the system asks for an approval note (optional). If it was the last, the whole task is complete.
   • Request changes → the stage returns to In progress in the name of the very person who submitted it, to fix it — not another team.
   • Return to previous stage → for when the problem came from the team before.

Editing a task

• Title and description: editable at any time, by anyone who can open the task.
• Due date: the change is written to the task's audit log. It can be edited from the card on the board itself, not only from inside the task.
• Archiving: the archive button in the task panel header moves it to the Archive scope, taking its active subtasks with it. Restore from archive brings back both it and whatever went down with it.
• Deleting: available to the administrator and the project manager. A deleted task cannot be recovered, and its subtasks are not deleted with it — they become independent tasks. If you meant to hide it rather than destroy it, archiving is the door that opens again.

For the employee

The "My tasks" screen

The My tasks row opens a screen of your own, distinct from All tasks: it has no view strip and no scope strip, but two tabs — List and Planner — and three sections under the heading:

• My current stage — the running stage you claimed, or one you're the default assignee for that nobody has claimed yet; along with your individual and team tasks assigned to you, or that you review, and are not yet complete.
• Your team's turn: <team name> — running stages assigned to a team you belong to that nobody has claimed, under the line: "Whoever claims it first takes it. It disappears for everyone else the moment it's accepted." Each stage here has two buttons: Claim this stage and Details.
• Stages I've finished — a collapsed section keeping every stage you finished, even where the whole task isn't done yet.

At the top of the screen a counter reads "N active · M done", with three quick filter chips: Overdue · This week · Urgent — one at a time, each with the count of what it will show.

Claiming a stage

When a stage is assigned to a team (not a person), the first member to press Claim this stage becomes responsible, and you see "You claimed this stage." This prevents duplication — and whoever got there first reads "Someone else claimed it before you." The button only shows for those entitled to it: the stage's default assignee, a member of the team that owns it, or an administrator — and only on a stage that is In progress and unclaimed.

Finishing your stage

1. Do your work (comments, attachments, checklist if there is one).
2. Press Finish stage on the card — or Submit my stage for approval if you're inside the task panel. The button shows only for whoever claimed the stage.
3. You're asked for a handover note (optional) — a small field that opens under the card on the My tasks screen with Submit and Cancel buttons; write the note or leave it.
4. The stage moves to Submitted for approval, carries an awaiting approval badge, and a notification reaches the reviewer.

Individual and team tasks

These have no stages, so their door is different: on the task you'll find a Submit for approval button when you're done, which moves it to Awaiting approval and shows you "Sent for approval" with an Undo for anyone who pressed too fast. The reviewer then decides with Approve or Request changes.

Comments and attachments

• Comment: write in the Comments section at the bottom of the task. Everyone who can open the task sees it. And commenting makes you a follower automatically, so notifications about it reach you afterwards — you can follow or unfollow by hand with the Follow bell button in the panel header.
• Attachment: from the Attachments section drag the file into the rectangle, or press it to choose a file, or press the Attach button in the quick bar at the top of the task. The limit is 20 MB per file, and anything larger is refused. Accepted types are a fixed list: images (JPEG, PNG, WebP, GIF), PDF, Word, Excel and PowerPoint files, plain text and CSV, and ZIP archives. Anything else is refused with an error — and SVG is excluded deliberately, because it is an active document that can carry code.

The timer

An individual task and a team task have an optional timer, visible to whoever is assigned: press Start timer when you begin and Stop when you're done — it helps track actual time against the estimate. The button disappears once the task is complete.

The checklist

Inside every task — and inside every stage — is a section called Checklist: small items ticked off one by one. Useful for multi-step tasks without needing to split them into separate tasks:

• Type the item in the "Add a new item…" field and press Add.
• Complete an item by pressing its box, edit its text by typing over it, and delete it with the bin icon.
• Beside the section heading is a done-of-total counter (4/7, say), with a progress bar beneath it.

Labels

A quick visual classification with a colour and text: "urgent", "needs legal review", "waiting on customer", and so on. They show as coloured strips at the top of the task card.

• A label is written inside the task itself, not in settings and not in the create dialog. Open the task, press Labels in the quick bar, and a new label dialog opens: type the label text, pick a colour from the palette, then Add. Delete it with the × on the strip itself.
• There is no company-level label list defined once and picked from afterwards; every task carries its own labels, and if two tasks share the same text they are two copies of it, not one.
• Up to 20 labels per task, and a label's text up to 40 characters.

How do I print the task sheet?

The idea in one line: what prints is what you're looking at after filtering — not all the company's tasks, and not just what fits the screen, but the result of the filters you left set. Set the project, the scope and the search text first, then print.

From the task page toolbar press Print (the button's title is Print task sheet). A small dialog opens telling you first of all how many tasks will reach the paper, then asking you three questions:

1. Sheet title — the default is Task sheet, and leaving it empty returns to the default.
2. Group by — No grouping, Assignee, Project, Status, Priority, or Due month. Each group prints with its heading and its row count beside it, and an empty group says No tasks.
3. Columns — seven checkboxes: Task, Project, Assignees, Status, Priority, Due, Stage. The first six are pre-ticked, and Stage alone is off — because it fills only for a pipeline task with a running stage.

Then Print (or Cancel), and your browser's print dialog opens.

What does the page carry? At the top, your company letterhead: the logo, the legal name (or the company name if no legal name is registered), the tagline, and the contact line — phone, email and website — plus the tax number and commercial registration if you chose to show them, and the address. Beneath it the sheet title, then a line summarising what was printed: the project name (or All projects), the scope (All tasks, My tasks or Archive), and your search text in quotes if you were searching — together with the date and time stamp of the print. At the foot of the page is the letterhead's footer, if you wrote one.

The letterhead itself is edited once from Settings → My company, and every one of the company's pages comes out of it: the task sheet, the work-order ticket, and invoices. It's split across two screens by the question each answers: Print templates carries the page's appearance — the logo, tagline, contact line, the two footers, the paper size and the two show-number switches, with a live preview that changes with every character you type; and Company profile carries the legal identity itself — legal name, tax number, commercial registration and address. See Settings.

And these are the details that usually surprise people:

• A task with two assignees appears twice when grouping by Assignee: once under each. That is intended — a sheet handed to a person must carry their complete list.
• A task with no assignee lands under Unassigned, and carries the same word in the Assignees column; one with no due date lands under No date when grouping by due month.
• The due date prints exactly as stored, in Latin digits, and is not reinterpreted through a time zone — so it never slips a day backwards on a page read tomorrow.
• The paper size is read from the letterhead: choose A5 in Default paper size and the sheet pins itself to A5. Leave it on A4 — the default — and the sheet imposes no size, coming out on whatever the print dialog is set to. The list offers no sizes but these two.
• Due month appears as a heading in year-month form — like 2026-08 — not as a month name.
• Group order follows the task order in the list, not the alphabet and not the calendar.
• The sheet's grouping is independent of the Group button in the List view; what you choose in the dialog belongs to the page alone, which is why it has six options where the view has three plus the project's custom fields.
• Column order is fixed. You choose which appear, not in what order.

What printing does not do

• No file export. No PDF and no CSV through this door — what there is, is the browser's print dialog, and from it you print or save a PDF with your own system's tools. (The file door in Tasks is Import, not export.)
• No button on the phone. The button isn't shown on a screen 640 pixels wide or narrower.
• No silent printing and no automatic printing — and no log saying who printed the sheet and when, unlike work orders, which keep a print log.
• The sheet carries no internal task detail: no description, no comments, no attachments, no checklist items, no labels, no whiteboard — seven columns and nothing more.
• No subtasks. A subtask lives inside its parent's card and counts as no independent row in any view — nor on the sheet. The page carries parent tasks alone.
• No scheduling and no emailing. Printing is a manual act in the moment.

FAQ

Q: I finished my stage and then found a mistake. How do I get it back? A: You can't yourself, once it's submitted for approval. Ask the reviewer to return it with Request changes.

Q: Why can't I see a particular task? A: Usually because it isn't assigned to you or your team and you aren't its reviewer. Ask the project lead to assign it to you or add you to the team that owns its stage.

Q: The task is late but the reason was out of my hands. Will I lose points? A: The deduction stops by itself in two states where the task leaves your hands: Awaiting approval and Needs changes — so submit it and the counter stops. It also stops once the task is archived. And even while it runs it is bounded: one point per day late, capped at five points per task, and those are numbers your manager sets — or switches the deduction off entirely — from Settings → HR → Rewards & recognition. The deduction falls on the task's assignee, so a task with no assignee is deducted from nobody. Details are in the rewards guide.

Q: Can I assign a task to someone outside the project? A: Yes — the assignment list shows every employee in the company, not only project members, and assigning a task to someone opens it for them. Stages of a pipeline task, though, are assigned to a team, so whoever you want on a stage should be added to the team that owns it.

Q: The printed sheet came out with more tasks than I can see on screen. A: That is correct. The sheet prints the filter's result, not what the screen drew — and the board spreads those same tasks across its columns, so no single column equals the sheet. The count at the top of the dialog, before you press Print, is exactly the number of rows on the page; if you want it shorter, narrow the filters and then print.

Q: I can't find the print button on my phone. A: Because it isn't shown on small screens (640 pixels or under). Print the sheet from a browser on a larger screen.

Q: The page came out with no logo and no tax number. A: The letterhead is read from your company settings, not from the tasks page, and what's missing lives on two screens rather than one: the logo is in Settings → My company → Print templates — and it alone saves the moment you choose it, without waiting for Save — while the tax number is in Company profile, and Print templates carries nothing of it but the show tax number switch. And even with the switch on, a line for a number that was never entered doesn't print. See Settings.

Q: I print the sheet but I can't find Print templates in my settings. A: Because editing the letterhead belongs to the company administrator alone, and printing does not: anyone who can open All tasks prints on their company's full letterhead. Ask your administrator to set it once, and every page of yours comes out with it thereafter.

Q: The Stage column came out empty. A: Because it fills only for a pipeline task with a running stage. An individual task and a team task have no stages at all — which is why it is the one column not pre-ticked in the dialog.

Q: Why doesn't my pipeline card move when I drag it to another column? A: Because it deliberately doesn't drag between columns. A pipeline task's status is moved by approving its stages, so open it and approve the running stage instead of dragging the card.

Quick reference

Related articles

• Projects — the container tasks live inside
• The planner — the second tab on the My tasks screen
• Teams & permissions — Assign tasks and Approve tasks, and who holds them
• Settings — the Print templates section: the letterhead the sheet comes out on
• Work orders — the other page that comes out on the same letterhead
• Custom fields — fields you add inside a task
• The whiteboard — the drawing board inside a task
• Rewards — how lateness affects points