Choosing a view

Every project has several views over the same data. They're not alternatives so much as different questions.

My work — "what have I got on?"

The one view that isn't about a project. My work in the sidebar gathers everything you're on the hook for across every project you can see, so you don't have to open each one and look for your own name.

That means two things: tasks assigned to you, and tasks in projects you own that nobody has been assigned to. Unassigned work in your own project is still yours to pick up or hand on, and leaving it out meant a page built to show you your work quietly missed some of it — which matters most if you work on your own, where there's nobody else it could belong to. Rows nobody is assigned to are marked unassigned, so you can tell what was handed to you from what's simply waiting.

It's grouped by project, because a task without its project is hard to make sense of — but two rules stop a big project burying a small one:

• Projects are ordered by whatever needs you soonest, never by how much is in them. A single overdue task in an otherwise-empty project sits above a thirty-task project that isn't due for a month.
• A project with nothing pressing arrives collapsed — one line telling you how much is in there and when it next wants you. Expand it when you want it.

Anything waiting on an unfinished prerequisite sits at the bottom of its project and names what it's waiting for, so you can chase that instead of staring at it.

Backlog items get their own section at the end. Work you haven't committed to yet is usually undated and often an odd job rather than part of a plan — mixed in with real project work it would either drown the plan or sink to the bottom and never be seen. It's listed flat, with the project named on each row.

Paused and finished projects are left out entirely: a project you've deliberately parked shouldn't be telling you it's overdue.

Each row has a timer button on hover for logging time straight against it — this is usually the moment you're actually thinking about what you spent the day on, and without it you'd have to remember which project the task was in and go the long way round. It only appears where the project has time tracking switched on.

There's a project filter at the top when you have work in more than one. And on any project board, the Everyone / Mine filter does the same job within that one project.

Phases & tasks — "what is everything?"

The full structured list, phase by phase. The place to add and reorganise work, set dependencies, and see everything at once. Start here when setting a project up.

How the views relate

The same tasks appear in every view, and three different things can be "in order":

• Phases & tasks shows the plan's sequence. Drag a task by its handle to reorder it; if the tasks are dated, Waymarq offers to move the dates to follow the new order, each task starting the working day after the one before. Say no if the reorder is about importance rather than timing.
• Kanban column order is your working order — what you'll pick up next within a status. Dragging a card up or down within a column changes nothing outside the board. Dragging it to another column changes its status, which every view shows.
• Gantt and Calendar go by dates. Dragging a bar changes the dates, which every view shows.

Kanban — "what's happening now?"

Five columns by status, starting with Backlog. Drag a card to move it on — dragging out of Backlog is how you commit to a piece of work. Best for the daily "what's in flight" conversation and for a team working through a queue.

Cards show the reference, due date, checklist progress and a warning triangle when something is blocked by an unfinished prerequisite. On a project where more than one person holds tasks, cards also show who has each one and your own are outlined; on a one-person project neither appears — every card would be the same face.

Each column carries a faint wash of its status colour — the same colours used for status everywhere else in Waymarq, so a bar on the Gantt chart and a column here obviously mean the same thing. A card marked Urgent or High priority gets a coloured stripe down its left edge; Normal cards get none, which is what lets the marked ones stand out. Roadmap cards carry the same stripe, and the Gantt shows it as a small dot beside the task name — the bar itself is already busy with status and schedule.

Team board — "what is the studio doing?"

The account-wide Kanban, in the sidebar. The same five columns, but every open task across every
project you can see, so you can work through the week without opening each project in turn.

Cards name the client and project above the task, because a board that spans projects is unreadable
without it. Adding a task asks which project it belongs to first, and opens the task afterwards so
you can fill in the rest.

Two differences from a project's own board. Finished work isn't shown — across a whole account
the Done column would be most of the screen; move a card there to complete it and it leaves the
board, staying on its project. And you can't reorder within a column: a hand-sorted order is
something each project keeps for itself, so the board sorts by date and then by priority instead.

Best for: a studio running several small jobs at once, where "what's in flight" is a question about
the week rather than about one client.

Gantt — "when, and in what order?"

The timeline. Bars for tasks, grouped under collapsible phase rows, with dependency arrows between them. Weekends and observed holidays are shaded, a red line marks today, and a second line shows how far through the work you actually are — if it's behind today, you're behind.

Drag a bar to move it, drag its edges to resize. Waymarq warns you before a drag breaks a dependency, and offers to shift dependent work along with it.

The Compact / Expanded / Summary control at the top switches how the chart reads. Compact (the default) is best for scanning a long range at a glance. Expanded is four times wider, for a plan with a lot of genuinely one-day tasks that need room to show their own title — long titles wrap onto a second line rather than truncating. Summary collapses every phase to a single bar for a client conversation; it's folded into the same control rather than a separate switch, since a collapsed phase bar already spans many days on its own and has no real use for the wider Expanded view.

Export is on both the per-project Gantt and the organisation-wide one, and both offer the same two formats. The Excel workbook has a coloured day-by-day grid on its first tab — task, reference, assignee, status and last-updated date down the left, phase bars and status-coloured task bars across the days, weekends/holidays shaded, and a colour-key legend underneath — the same picture as the chart, but yours to filter, resize or recolour; a flat one-row-per-task list sits on the second tab for pivoting. The landscape PDF is the chart alone — no sidebar, no page chrome — with a short detail line up top (client, status, deadline, % complete, phase/task counts on a project; the date window and totals on the team-wide one), the same colour legend, and prerequisite lines drawn between a task's bar and whatever it depends on, sized to fit the whole plan on one page. Both filenames carry the date they were exported. The organisation-wide export groups by project instead of by phase, and its grid is bounded to whatever date window is currently loaded on screen — its flat list, unlike the per-project one, still covers every in-flight project regardless of that window.

Best for: negotiating dates, spotting a squeeze, showing a client the shape of a project.

Roadmap — "what leads to what?"

A top-to-bottom flow. Phases in sequence, and within each phase, tasks that can run in parallel sit side by side while dependent tasks step down with an arrow. Toggle completed work off to see only what's ahead.

Best for: answering "what can we start next" and "what is everything waiting on". Better than the Gantt for understanding structure; worse for dates.

Calendar — "what's on this month?"

Tasks and project events (meetings, deadlines, milestones) laid out by date. There's an organisation-wide calendar too, coloured by assignee, for "who's doing what this month" across every project.

Every entry names the client above the task — on a month that spans projects, "Brand guidelines" on
its own doesn't tell you whose. On a project's own calendar it's just the client, since the project
is the page you're already on. Anything waiting on someone outside the
organisation is drawn with a dashed outline and faint diagonal
shading: it's on the calendar because it occupies those days, but it isn't your time.

Which to give a client

The Gantt in Summary view, or a share link — a read-only page with no login that shows progress and timing but never budgets, rates or internal notes. See Sharing progress with a client.