How to make sure an outstanding Task is not overlooked

I’ve started to use Tasks to make a note of where I’ve got to with my research. Sometimes I find it’s quite easy to forget to finish a Task (my advancing years I suppose!) so lines of enquiry are left unresolved. I could do with a visual reminder, a bit like a webhint icon. Could I ask please for the icon in the Tasks column on the Edit Person screen to be colour coded according to importance? It might be good to reduce the number of different priorities from nine to perhaps just three - High (red), Medium (blue) and Low (green).

There could be a challenge with that request since you can have multiple tasks, with multiple levels of priority. Would you automatically use the highest priority? When adding a new task it automatically adds it with priority 1 (highest priority). Which means a lot of us could have high alerts simply because we didn’t set a priority level.

The other challenge I see is you would have to physically open that person’s Edit Person screen to see they have a task. That means the odds are you don’t get back to them. If you use the slide-in-workflow on the Edit Person screen a single click on the task icon will show all the tasks with their priority levels and status.

If you are using priority levels then you can sort the Task page and have a visual reminder of which people you need to finish tasks for.

The way I’ve managed this is I have a Folder called “What I’m working on”. Inside that folder I put immediate tasks that I haven’t completed. I check that folder before I start anything new. I even have a task inside the folder called “!Start Here”. Where I leave exact notes for myself on what project I was on and where to start. Tasks can be assigned to multiple people and folders. Any general type tasks are assigned to me so I can also open my profile to review them. If I determine what seemed urgent in the middle of the night is not so pressing in the morning I will move it out of that folder to a new one.

Currently, I am only using priority 1, 5 and 9, which would be three. Having the program reduce the number of priority levels would mean a loss of data for any user currently using all nine priority levels. Which we wouldn’t want to do. Its best to have users restrict themselves to the number they want to use.

Renee, Those are all good points. I think the answer is that I must follow your suggestions and start every new session in a ‘Start Here’ Tasks folder.
Maybe it would be useful to have an item ‘Tasks’ showing like ‘Problem Alerts’ do in the pop-up box below (not sure what the box is called!)

We do have an enhancement request for it to show in the Info Box if a Task is available. Similar to what we did with To-Do’s and Research Logs in RM7.