You've marked a job as a project. There are a few ways to look at it now, and two of them are where you'll actually spend your time — the Board and the Timeline. It isn't obvious which one you want.
There's one question that sorts it, and you can answer it in about five seconds.
Does the order matter?
That's it. That's the whole question.
Think about the work in this project. Does it have to happen in a particular sequence, or could you tackle any part of it on any day?
If the order matters, start with the Timeline
Some work has a spine. You can't waterproof before the rough-in. You can't connect to the grid before the inspection passes. One thing has to finish before the next can start, and if something slips, everything behind it slips too.
That's what the Timeline is for. Each task becomes a bar on a calendar, so you can see:
- how long the whole project runs
- what's happening in which week
- which tasks are waiting on other tasks
- what a delay actually costs you
If there's a handover date, or subbies who need to be booked in the right order, you want the Timeline.
If the order doesn't matter, start with the Board
Other work is just a pile. Thirty defects to clear before handover. Forty sites to inspect this quarter. A maintenance contract's worth of callouts. Any of it could be done in any order — what you actually need to know is what's finished, what someone's on, and what's stuck.
That's the Board. Tasks sit in lists, and you move them along as the work progresses. It's the view that answers "where are we up to?" at a glance.
If you've used Trello or a whiteboard with sticky notes, you already know how this works.
Some examples
| The work | Which one | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Bathroom renovation | Timeline | Demo, rough-in, waterproof, tile, fit-off. The sequence is fixed. |
| Handover defect list | Board | Thirty items, any order. You just need them cleared. |
| Solar install across three visits | Timeline | Assessment, then approval, then install, then inspection. |
| Quarterly compliance round, 40 sites | Board | Every site is independent. It's about what's done. |
| Switchboard upgrade with an outage window | Timeline | The date is fixed and everything works back from it. |
| Warranty callbacks on a finished build | Board | They arrive when they arrive. |
Most projects are actually both
Here's the thing nobody tells you: real projects usually have both kinds of work in them.
A bathroom renovation has a strict sequence up front — you genuinely cannot reorder demo, rough-in, waterproofing and tiling. But once the work is done, you've got a defect list, and that's just a pile of small jobs in no particular order.
Same project. Two shapes of work. Both in Project Checklist at the same time.
You don't have to choose. Every task lives in one place, and the Board and the Timeline are two ways of looking at the same tasks. Nothing is duplicated. Nothing needs syncing. Change something in one view and it's changed in the other, because it was never two things to begin with.
So the practical answer for most projects is: plan the sequenced part in the Timeline, work the day-to-day on the Board, and switch whenever it suits you.
You can't get this wrong
Because the views are just lenses on the same work, picking the "wrong" one costs you nothing. You switch views from the dock and everything's still there.
The dock is the small row of icons floating over the board: Hover it and it opens out; click an icon to switch. If it's ever in your way, drag it — it snaps to whichever edge you let go near, and stays there.
So don't overthink it. If the project has a deadline and a sequence, open the Timeline. If it's a list of things that need doing, open the Board. You'll know within a minute whether the other one suits you better.
The other views
Two views is where you'll live. The rest are there for when you want something specific:
- Calendar — the plan laid out on a month, week or day. Handy for booking work in and for spotting the weeks that are too full.
- Table — every task as a row, sortable, with the columns you choose. This is the one to open when someone asks a question the Board can't answer at a glance.
- Staff (Board) — the same board, grouped by who the work belongs to.
And if your project has child jobs, you get one more:
- Map — the whole project drawn as a branching picture. The job at the root, branching out to its lists and its child jobs, each of those branching to its own lists. It answers "what is this project actually made of", which is a hard thing to see any other way once the work is spread across several jobs.
You don't need any of them to get started, and none of them change the answer to the question above.