Owning tasks and keeping a plan current

The project plan is the detail behind a status. It is worth keeping current mostly because it means your cycle update writes itself — if the plan is honest, the narrative is a summary rather than an act of recall.

Task statuses

Not Started

Nobody has begun. The default.

In Progress

Actively being worked on.

Completed

Done.

Blocked

Cannot proceed. Use this honestly — it is the only status that asks someone else to act.

Blocked is the one that matters. A task sitting at In Progress for three weeks tells a reader nothing; the same task marked Blocked is a question someone can answer.

Dates

Every task has a start and a due date. Those roll up: a phase takes its dates from the earliest start and latest due date of the tasks inside it, and shows them as “(auto)”. You do not maintain phase dates by hand once a phase has tasks.

When a date slips, move it. A plan full of dates that passed last month is not a record of commitment, it is noise — and the project header will show the slippage against the original target anyway, so moving a date does not hide anything.

Notes and the progress log

Each task has two places to write, and they are deliberately different.

Notes

An editable scratchpad. Current context — rewrite it freely as things change.

Progress log

Stamped, append-only entries. A dated record of what happened and when. Entries cannot be edited afterwards, which is what makes the log worth reading.

Use Notes for “what is true now” and the progress log for “what happened”. Project-level notes also roll into an Activity feed on the project's Health tab, which is a good place to catch up before a meeting.

Dependencies

A task can depend on another task or on a whole phase in the same project. When a prerequisite is going to finish after the dependent task is meant to start, the task is flagged with a warning marker, and the project header shows how many tasks are at risk.

StatusLoop will not silently move your dates for you. It flags the conflict and offers a one-click reschedule that shifts the task to start after its prerequisite, keeping the same duration. Automatic cascading was deliberately not built — a plan that rearranges itself overnight is a plan nobody trusts.

A reasonable rhythm

Ten minutes before your cycle is due is enough: mark what finished, move dates that have genuinely moved, set anything stuck to Blocked, and add one progress-log entry for anything a reader would want explained. Then the update itself is a summary of what you just did.