Working with Your Tasks

The Tasks page is the one place that shows every task in the firm at once, yours and everyone else’s, planned and finished. Because a task in Outlaw is also a time entry once you start it (see Tasks and time entries are the same thing), this page is both your to-do list and your timesheet. The point of everything below is to get you to the right slice of that list fast: the work due today, one client’s billable time, last week’s completed tasks for a particular paralegal, and then to act on it without opening each task one at a time.

The Three Views

The same tasks can be shown three ways, and you switch between them with the view picker at the top of the page. Outlaw remembers which view you last used.

• Grid is the default, and it is the view that makes Outlaw’s priority thinking visible. The grid is nine squares, three by three: across is urgency and down is impact, each rated low, medium, or high (see The Task Page for what those two ratings mean). A task sits in the square that matches its impact and urgency, so the high-impact, high-urgency work lands in one corner and the “someday, low stakes” work in the opposite one. At a glance you see not just what you have to do but what actually matters most.
• Calendar lays the same tasks out by date, the way you would expect a calendar to work. Tasks with a start time appear as scheduled appointments in the right slot; tasks without one show as all-day items on their due date. You can move between a month view and a week view.
• Table is a plain, dense list, useful when you just want to scan or sort a lot of tasks without the grid’s layout or the calendar’s dates. (On a phone the Table option is hidden, since the grid already collapses to a single scrollable list.)

Both the Grid and the Calendar are color-coded by workload. Outlaw adds up the estimated time on the visible tasks and shades the total green, yellow, or red depending on how full the day looks, so an over-committed day is obvious before you live it. Tasks with no time estimate count as zero and the total shows a + to admit it is probably low. This is why a few seconds spent on an estimate when you create a task pays you back here.

Creating a Task from This Page

How you start a new task depends on the view you are in, but the rule for finishing it is the same everywhere: a task needs only a title and a due date to save. Everything else can wait. (Your administrator can choose to also require a category and activity type; if so, Outlaw marks those fields and tells you what is missing before it lets you save.) We still recommend adding an estimated time every time, because that is what powers the workload coloring above.

• In the Grid, each square has an add (+) button. Click the + in the square that matches the work’s priority and the new task opens already set to that impact and urgency, so you are deciding how important the task is at the one moment you are most likely to think about it. Fill in the title and due date and save.
• In the Calendar, create a task the way you would in any calendar: drag across an open block of time, or double-click an empty spot. Either way the new task comes back with its start time, due date, and a duration already filled in (a range you drag becomes that duration; a double-click defaults to 30 minutes), so a calendar-created task is a scheduled appointment from the start.

Filtering Down to What You Need

The page can show thousands of tasks, so the filters are how you make it useful. They stack: every filter you set narrows the list further, and Outlaw remembers them between visits, so if the page ever looks emptier or fuller than you expect, check the filters first.

• Search is the broadest filter and often the only one you need. Type a name or a few words and Outlaw matches not just the task’s own title and description but everything connected to it: the client or matter it belongs to, its participants, the campaign or lead behind it, attached documents, and even text in its notes and private comments. Searching a client’s name, for example, surfaces every task tied to that client’s cases, contact card, or leads in one shot.
• Date range is the bar of buttons that decides which span of time you are looking at: Today, Tomorrow, Week, Month, All, or Custom. Today is the default, and it deliberately includes anything overdue, so a task you did not finish yesterday still shows up in today’s work instead of quietly disappearing. Tomorrow shows only what is due tomorrow. Week and Month show the current week or month. All drops the date limit entirely, which is what you want when you are hunting for a task by name and cannot remember when it was due. Custom opens a small calendar (itself color-coded by workload) where you pick a single day or a start-and-end range; this is handy for finding a light day to schedule a long new task.
• Category limits the list to certain kinds of work. Pick your billable categories, for instance, to see only client-billable tasks.
• User limits the list to certain people. Narrow it to just yourself to clear the noise, or to one paralegal to review their week.
• Status is the completion filter. By default the page shows incomplete tasks, the work still ahead of you. Switch it to Completed to review finished work, or All Tasks to see both. When you are showing completed tasks you also get a lookback control (Day, Week, Month, Year, All) that decides how far back to reach, since otherwise a busy firm’s full history would flood the list. A separate Past Due option keeps overdue work visible.

A worked example ties these together. To find this week’s completed tasks for one attorney, set the date range to Week, pick that attorney in the User filter, and switch Status to Completed. Because the filters are cumulative, the list that remains is exactly that person, that week, finished only.

Selecting Several Tasks at Once

When you want to do the same thing to a batch of tasks rather than one, you do not have to open them one by one. Hold Shift and click each task you want; selected tasks take on a highlighted background so you can see your batch building up. (Invoiced tasks cannot be selected, since they are locked to a finalized invoice.)

With a batch selected, two things become possible. You can drag the whole group into a different grid square to re-prioritize all of them at once, the same drag you would use for a single task. Or you can right-click any task in the selection to open the actions menu, which now applies to the entire batch.

The Bulk Actions

Right-clicking a task (or a selection) opens a menu of actions. The same menu is available whether you have one task or many; with a selection, each action runs across the whole batch.

• Duplicate makes a fresh copy of the task (without carrying over any time already logged), so a recurring piece of work does not have to be rebuilt from scratch.
• Delete removes the task. It is hidden for any task that has been put on an invoice, because an invoiced task is part of the case’s billing record and cannot be deleted.
• Mark private / Mark public changes who can see the task; across a selection you will see Mark all private and Mark all public.
• Move to reschedules the due date in one step, with a submenu of common targets: Today, Next Day, Next Week, Next Month, or Pick a Date for any date you choose.
• Assign to hands the task to a different user or to a group, drawn from your firm’s people (this appears when your firm has more than one user). Assigning to a group lets any member claim the work, up until someone starts it.
• Edit (single task) opens the task, and Convert to template (single task) turns a well-built task into a reusable template.

You can also reorder priorities directly by dragging a task between grid squares. That changes only the task’s impact and urgency, the position in your priority order; nothing else about the task moves.

Adding Tasks from Other Records

You do not have to come to the Tasks page to create a task. Most record pages carry their own tasks section so you can add work right where the context already lives, and a task added that way is automatically connected to the record you added it from. You will find an Add a new task control on:

• Cases, where the new task is set to client work on that case;
• Leads, where it is tied to that lead;
• Campaigns, where it is tied to that campaign;
• Contacts, where it is tied to that person;
• Invoices, where it joins the work being billed.

Adding a task from a case, for example, prefills its category as client work and sets the case for you, so the task arrives with its connection already made. These tasks show up on the main Tasks page like any other, because there is only ever one list of tasks.