Quick Tip: Creating Subtasks via drag and drop

Quick Tips / August 21, 2012 / Admin

Sometimes when planning out long term projects you have a series of related tasks. Instead of creating separate projects for grouped or dependant tasks, you can use subtasks to create a series of tasks, child tasks to the parent, in other words. This way, it’s much easier to visually identify similar tasks when looking at the longer list and to see the relationships between them. Also, you can hide the display of those subtasks temporarily to give you a higher level picture of a project’s workflow.

Create the first task by hitting the plus icon lower section of the progress tab, in the all section, or if you’re using pipelines, next to the stage you want to create the task in. Now to create subsequent tasks, we’ll use the quick entry feature to keep our hands on the keyboard. Type out your first task and then hit return. The task collapses showing just the name and the whole line is highlighted.

When a task is in this state, hitting space creates a new task immediately below it, ready to enter text for that new task. After a little practice, hitting return and then space will become second nature. Also notice that when a task is highlighted, you can use the up and down arrows to move through the list so hitting space will create a task in between existing tasks.

Clicking and dragging tasks allows you to reorder them. To make an existing task a subtask, hold down OPTION and drag it on top of the task it should be a child task of. Hitting space when a subtask is selected will create further subtasks. Clicking the arrow that appears next to the parent task will hide all child tasks. There’s also a contextual menu for creating subtasks too.

For a complicated project, grouping related tasks together within a pipeline can make seeing the high level task flow easier, while allowing you to reveal more granularity with a click of that arrow. And subtasks are also fully viewable on Daylite for iOS too. Any questions? Give us a shout in the comments…

11 Responses to “Quick Tip: Creating Subtasks via drag and drop”

  1. It’s a good idea to use this feature during the creation of a pipeline. Many task (and so many subtask) are the same in various project. Unfurtunally this feature lack for now.

  2. Tim
  3. “Type out your first task and then hit return.” Unfortunately, this functionality does not appear to be available in Worklist view.

  4. This is a fantastic feature! Thank you 🙂

  5. Tim Farr
  6. Why doesn’t the sub task feature work when creating or editing a pipeline in the preferences area?

  7. Emily Rudow
  8. @Tim Farr We have logged this as a feature request. Thanks for the feedback.

  9. Tim Farr
  10. Just found another issue. When to drag a task (subtask) onto an existing task (main task). You then lose the ‘details’ field from the (main task). However, if notes were already made in the main task BEFORE the sub task was created the field remains and you can continue to make notes in the main task.

    This is a bug that needs to be fixed please….

  11. Emily Rudow
  12. @Time Farr Which list view are you performing this in (ie. worklist, not done, etc.)?

    Can you reproduce this on every list?

  13. Florian Vetter
  14. great feature!
    BUT i’m missing the possibility to create subtasks when creating or editing a pipeline…
    Will this be added soon?

  15. Emily Rudow
  16. @Florian Thanks for the feedback. I’ve logged this as a feature request.

  17. We’d love to use subtasks within pipelines e.g. create pipelines w/ subtasks.

  18. Please add my vote for sub-tasks in the Pipeline view!

    Thanks,
    -Adam

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