Numbering Your Tasks

Jason, thanks for sharing this tip! Numeric prefixes are great when you use the "Sort By Title" option, and your solution is perfect for easily making changes to such structures :)

P.S. I am loving the memes, hope there are more to come!

We do this with our meetings so we can view them in order:

M1 - Weekly Meeting 09/07/2016

M2 - Weekly Meeting 09/14/2016

Numbering tasks is an ok work-around but it's not ideal.  Sometime you are importing project plans generated by other people/groups and it's a lot of work to have to add a numerical pre-fix to everything.  Plus sometimes sort order changes during a project so re-naming tasks again every time your sort criteria changes isn't feasible.  

I'd like to request an enhancement for this.  It would be great if the system would allow the user to set the default sort via a button at the top (similar to filter button).  I believe every other project management software we evaluated during our procurement process had this sorting option.

I agree with Jeni!

Hi Jeni and Vincent! You can currently choose from five sorting options in the List View:

1. Priority - this setting allows you to choose your own sorting order by dragging and dropping tasks in the List View. The order you choose here will be reflected in your team's Workspace too, and you can easily make adjustments at any point during a Project.
2. Importance - tasks are grouped by high, normal or low importance, which you can set in the Task View.
3. Title - this option enables alphanumeric sorting.
4. Status - tasks are displayed in status groups.
5. Date - groups tasks into seven categories: overdue, today, tomorrow, this week, next week, month, and later.

In the Table View, you can sort by ascending or descending order of any enabled column - just hover on the right side of the column name and click on the arrow icon which appears.

Would these sorting options work for your Projects? If you had something different in mind, please let me know, I'll be happy to hear about your ideas and share this feedback with the rest of the team!

[1.0]

[2.0]

[3.0]

Works very much in the same way as Jason Kimbrell suggestion

In the list view tasks can be sorted by priority. In that "mode" the user can move the tasks into the order that he likes without any numbering tricks. However, in table view I miss that option to sort by priority desperately. Sort options (at least this sort option) should be available in table view, too. All the existing sort options in table view (including sort by custom field) unfortunately do not compensate for that missing.

Agree Marcus - raised a ticket on this very subject last week. Would really like this ASAP.

@Marcus and @Robert, thank you for sharing that idea! I've sent this feedback over to our Product Team, because I can definitely see the value in having more options in the Table View. 

Does anyone have a suggestion for numbering tasks when there are up to 15 in a project? I tried numbering all 15 of the tasks to ensure they would remain in that order no matter what filter was chosen. When I came back to the list after a while I noticed that it had 10 to 15 at the top and then started at 1-9 after that. How is 10 before 1?

Hi Carly, thank you for the question! Numeric ordering depends on the amount of digits, so if you have more than ten tasks, the sequence should start with a zero: 01, 02, 03 ... 10, 11, 12. If the amount of tasks is over one hundred, another zero is added: 001, 002, and so on. This zero serves as a placeholder, ensuring that tasks appear in the correct order. Hope this helps! Let me know if you have any other questions :)

Hi Carly, I usually set up the projects in my company, but usually have edits in my list.  They are never perfect.  Like Anastasia's Recommendation, Zero placeholders work best to keep your list aligned.  I would suggest to keep your list in multitudes of 10.   010, 020, 030, 040, ....  , 140, 150.  If you find that you need to add an additional step, you have 9 extra slots to work with instead of renumbering the entire sequence.  Hope this helps.

010

020

030

035 Extra Task

040

050

Thanks Anastasia and Jason for your feedback. I'm sure these tips will help resolve the sorting issue that I was having! Much appreciated.

When is non-alphanumeric arrangement going to be an option for projects and folders? Nothing in life happens in alphanumeric fashion and this is a big downfall of this program

Hi Diane, there's definitely a lot of potential sorting order options, could you take a look at Dekker's post and add a +1 there?

We have a lot of projects where different groups must collaborate in one timeline. This causes us to also have to combine timelines into a folder where we can see all of the information in one place for the entire program. We are leveraging the 01.0, 02.0....10.1 style numbering during our launch and it seems to be working well, but I do agree with the majority of comments on this thread, this is not an ideal solution and it feels like a band aid.

Stephanie, there are workarounds but not an adequate fix. I have posted on that thread but once again, projects should not sort alphanumerically. 

This seems to still be an open item. The first comment was made almost two years ago and it doesn't seem that the software has been enhanced with the need to automatically create a numbering sequence for tasks and sub-tasks. Manually managing this for a project with several users updating tasks at the same time could prove to be more than just a challenge.

The tool is supposed to help organize the work, and in a lot of aspects it does that (very well I might add), but it seems like this particular aspect is a big miss on Wrike's part. Not to include this as a standard feature that many other tools already offer, as Jenina Gaines stated and as Marcus-Julian Rumpf so eloquently put it, creates dissatisfaction on the overall user experience. 

People using this type of tool are resourceful by nature, and the work-around solutions can help put a band-aid on the problem, but the honest truth is that it doesn't solve it, and it continues to be an unnecessary pain from a user standpoint.

Hopefully, the software level solution can be implemented soon by the great people at Wrike.

Thank you!

This "band-aid" solution of adding numbers to task titles is a bad workaround and seems to be adopted by Wrike as well.  I'm currently evaluating the platform and found that tasks are not auto numbered.  What's worse is the demo template that I choose gave me the impression that tasks are auto numbered.

Drag a task up or down in the Gantt chart or Table (can't do this) and the platform should update numbering including dependencies.  Seems to be a big oversight.  Smartsheet and MS Project have used this feature for over a decade.

100% agree with Jason, blows my mind that tasks don't have automatic numbering... causes a lot of problems when you've got static numbering and you need to change the order of tasks.

We just signed a year license, but if this isn't changed by renewal, we won't be able to stay :/

I have used a couple different naming conventions with varying luck. 

The first one is based on Semantic Versioning (MAJOR.MINOR.PATCH)  I borrowed this from Earned Value Management. 

---- Semantic Versioning ----

1.1.0 - Category 1

1.1.1 - Task 1 in Category 1

1.2.0 - Category 2

1.3.0 - Category 3

1.3.1 - Category 3 task 1

1.3.2 - Category 3 task 2

1.3.2.1 -  Category 3 task 2, sub-task1

These are roughly grouped into Project Stage(or Sprint) - Objective - Priority(or Order) - subtasks as needed

You can still put things in folders for easy navigation, but you can also see task order and grouping across an entire project quickly. 

For example, if I see a task named "1.3.2 - Client Review" I know right away it is a review of task "1.3.1 - Example Task Name Goes Here"

––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––

--- UNIX Date ---

I use a text expander (I use atext, but there are lots out there.  AutoHotkey is an amazeballs free Windows text expander.) that lets me type today's date and time in UNIX format quickly. If it is a task that won't come in more than once a day I used the date 2019-01-31 otherwise I can use the date and time 2019-01-31-17:18:53-PDT.  The obvious drawback is it makes the titles super long, but they do order themselves when sorted by title. 

Also I (and my colleagues) fully agree with the input of Jason and Harrison. Wrike is really a beautiful product, and we have come to love it, but the manual number of the tasks is a breakpoint for us. It is almost impossible to imagine that this is not possible to automatize this process. We work with WBS, therefore the order must be maintained. In addition, we want to retain the flexibility to make adjustments. Manual renumbering is then no solution, certainly not given the other beautiful features that Wrike has. My urgent request: please resolve this as soon as possible.

Our team has some pretty robust templates and numbering the tasks as well as creating parent tasks that "hold" types of tasks has been very helpful. For example, if you have a group of review tasks, you can make a task called "REVIEW ACTIVITIES" and add and manage those tasks in that parent task to keep things organized and not convolute your timeline. Here is a screenshot of how we have one of our templates set up.

It would be most helpful to help a numbering field that is easily editable like an excel document. That way ordering and re-ordering tasks would be as easy as click and drag.

Hi all, it's great to see your best practices and workaround solutions for this here.

This is something that has been requested on our Product Feedback section (this is the area of the Community that the Product Team review most often) so please go to this post to up-vote and also add your use-case in the comments - this helps the team understand what this should look like.

For now, sharing the way you're using numbering right now is great, so please continue to share your best practices here.

Thank you 🙌

Hey wrike forum post followers, there is a bit of WBS related momentum in a different post (which you might already be following).  If we can get a few more votes there, it might encourage wrike to consider some development.

https://help.wrike.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/360000281465-New-feature-WBS

I assume (hope) that there will be an opportunity to help wrike product developers figure out the scope to best deliver the specific feature you are interested in.