Displaying only Next Task Due rather than All Tasks
We have launched our Wrike instance this week and virtually every user is asking a similar question. Here are two quotes from their requests:
“I would like a report or dashboard that shows a list of all my active projects and the current task that needs to be done vs all the tasks for that project that need to be done until the project is over.“
“Is there a way to only show the next doable task? Otherwise it looks like I have dozens of tasks ‘to do’ or ’overdue’ but really there’s no way to do them yet because the prerequisite tasks have not been completed.”
Is there a way to only show (in a Dashboard Widget or a Report) only the next Task that needs to be completed, but no other subsequent ones? Has anyone else gotten this request and did you find a work-around, if nothing else? They just want to see one task (the next one due) from each of their Projects.
Welcome to the Community Kenneth Westerman 🙂 Thank you for posting such an interesting question! I can definitely see how this can be very useful to only display the task that you need to work on now, excluding not only the completed tasks (which is easily done using filters) but also the subsequent tasks. This is possible to achieve using a combination of Wrike features: Gantt Chart, Wrike's Automation, and Statuses and Workflows.
First, make sure that you set up task dependencies on the Gantt Chart. This will be needed for setting up an automation rule that I'll be mentioning below. Here's my example: I have a folder called "My projects" with projects with tasks in it. I've set up dependencies between the tasks in projects. You can see that in "Admin's projects: Project1" and "External user's projects: Project1" there are three tasks with dependencies:
Now that we have the dependencies, we can create an automation rule (please check out the article for more details). The rule is applied to all tasks in "My projects". The trigger here is "If all predecessor statuses change to a completed status" (that's why we needed to set up the dependencies), and the action is "Change tasks status to "In progress" (you can use any convenient status here or even create a custom workflow with a status called, for example, "Ready to be worked on").
So now, any time a predecessor task is completed, the next task in the dependency chain will automatically receive the "In Progress" status:
Future tasks will remain "Not Started", so we have separated the next "to do" task from the future tasks. Now we can filter any Wrike View to only show the "In Progress" tasks:
And if we apply that filter, we will only see the one task that is ready to be worked on:
It's also possible to create a dashboard widget that will include all the tasks from a particular folder with "In Progress" status:
I hope this is useful to you! Please don't hesitate to get back to me here if you have any questions, I'll be happy to discuss this with you 👍
Lisa Community Team at Wrike Wrike Product Manager Become a Wrike expert with Wrike Discover
Lisa Wrike Team member Become a Wrike expert with Wrike Discover
Thanks so much, Lisa, for your detailed response. We already use custom workflows for our task statuses, so I added a new status called "Ready to Be Worked On" and implemented the automation as you suggested. However, the WrikeBot is changing all our sub-tasks to "Ready to Be Worked On" (if the parent task is completed) even if the sub-tasks were already previously completed. Is there any way to keep the WrikeBot from changing the task status when the task is already completed?
Here you can see that I marked 14 tasks/sub-tasks as Completed:
Then after the WrikeBot runs again, I end up with a bunch of tasks that need to be worked on again:
Any suggestions?
Also, please note that the WrikeBot is also changing the parent task statuses to the Default Workflow "Completed" (light green) when it was previously set to our Custom Workflow "Completed" (dark green). Why is it doing that? (My automation trigger is set to "Any Completed".)
Thank you,
Kenneth
Hi again Kenneth Westerman! After you commented here the last time, I've asked my colleagues from the Support team to reach out to you to troubleshoot this. Please check out Aaron reply in the ticket and feel free to get back to him if this behavior still persists 👍
Please let me know if I can help you with anything else 🙌
Lisa Community Team at Wrike Wrike Product Manager Become a Wrike expert with Wrike Discover
Lisa Wrike Team member Become a Wrike expert with Wrike Discover