Achieve Time Management & Goal Setting Software Help

Tasks (Achieve Planner)

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The Tasks view uses a grid to display tasks for a particular project or display tasks grouped by all projects. See Using Grids for help with the grid user interface. See Using Priorities for more information on how to prioritize tasks.

You can use the Project drop down button (or use the Switch Projects command from the Actions menu) to select the specific Project for which to display tasks or select the "All Projects" item to display a grouped view of all projects.

To add tasks for a specific project that is not already shown, switch to view the tasks for that project and then add the tasks.

The view dropdown can be used to change the view being used to display the tasks (some Task views commands with shortcuts are also available from the View menu.)

Achieve's Projects and Tasks views replace the to-do list used in traditional time management systems. A project represents an outcome or result that you want to accomplish while tasks represent the action steps. Separating these two concepts will help you make better use of your time by allowing you to focus on outcomes instead of just actions and is a more effective way of keeping tack of what you need to do. See Getting Organized Overview for more details.

You can open the selected task row(s) to reveal the Task Information Form. To open a row you can: double click on it, press Ctrl+Enter or invoke the File | Open | Open Selected Items... command from the file menu or standard toolbar.

"Next Action" Task Reminders

There are many times when you just want to make a note of the "next action" that you need to take on a task without having to adjust effort values. This can be done with "next action" reminder tasks, which are regular children of a task that have no expected effort or effort left values (values are set to 0h). By default, children of a parent task are not given any effort values unless the parent already has another child with non-zero effort.

For example, you may have a task "Prepare Presentation Outline" with an expected effort of 2h. Before completing the task, you need to go to a meeting and you don't want to forget where you left off. You simply add a child task (press Ctrl+Insert) and write where you left off ("Add November Sales Summary figures to presentation"). Since this is a reminder task, it will not affect the effort values associated with the parent.

You should only use action reminder tasks for tasks that don't have any children with effort.

Achieve uses special rules to handle these action reminder tasks. They are not scheduled as regular tasks (since they are just reminders). If a parent task only has action reminder child tasks, it is not considered a Summary task for scheduling purposes and the effort values of the parent task itself are used in scheduling (rather than using the child task values.)

Task Actions

The task view supports the following task specific commands through the Actions menu.

Estimate Effort/Cost...	Quick dialog to estimate the effort/cost of a task
New Task...	Create a new task at the same level as the active row
Open Project...	Open the Project Information form for the project(s) associated with the selected task(s)
Record Work/Expenses...	Record work/expenses for the selected task(s) (see Recording Work/Expenses)
Complete Task...	Enter final work/expense for selected task(s) and mark them as completed (see Completing Tasks)
Move to Project...	Move selected tasks to a different project (as top-level tasks)
Export to Outlook	Export selected tasks to Microsoft Outlook® (as Outlook® tasks)
Promote to Project	Promote the selected task(s) as project(s) (immediate children of the task's current project)
View Email...	For tasks that were imported from Outlook® emails, view the associated Outlook® email (see Outlook Synchronization for details)
Attachments...	Opens the Task Information Form in the attachments tab so you can add/launch task attachments/URLs
Set Recurrence...	Set or change the recurrence settings for the task (see Project/Task Recurrence topic for details)
Skip Recurrence	Skip a single instance of the recurring task pattern without creating a new instance
Reschedule	Reschedule all active projects/tasks based on the latest information. See Project/Task Scheduling for details.
Schedule Block	Schedule a task block for the selected task in the weekly schedule. The size for the block is based on the effort left for the task, and the default project block size for the task's project. Press Esc to exit drop mode in the weekly schedule.