Tasks are central to every part of Outlaw Practice. Tasks serve many roles in the system, most notably time entries to track time spent on client work. Yet tasks are also used to track time spent on marketing and sales, human resources and administrative tasks. They are also placeholders for future work, to assist with planning your week and estimating future client work.

The main task page has two views, Grid and Calendar. We will cover creating tasks in each view separately.

Grid View asks the user to create a task in one of the nine grid squares, based on impact and urgency (it is critical to determine the impact and urgency at the time of task creation, as it is often the only time the task will be given such attention!). To create a new task, click on the add (+) button in the target grid square (see below):

This will immediately open the New Task page, which at first glance can be overwhelming. In most cases all you need to enter is a title and due date in order to save the task (although your administrator can require that a category and activity type be required at all times). We also recommend that you always add a an estimated time, as these are critical for planning your day. As in other places in the program, you can easily tell which fields are mandatory, as they will have a red asterix after the field name. You will also get a hint in the ok/cancel section on what is required. For example, in the case below, the title is empty. See What's in a Task for an explanation of the task's fields.

At this point, you can click on the OK button to save and close the task.

Note that you can drag tasks between grid squares to change their priority. It will not change anything else in the task.

Adding a task to the calendar view is similar to other calendaring applications, where you select a time range on an open part of the calendar to create a new task. In this case, the task will have its start time, estimated duration and due date set, but will default to medium impact and medium urgency. Similarly, double-clicking on an empty space anywhere on the calendar will create a new task with the start time and due date set, and a default estimated duration of 30 minutes.

Note that you can drag tasks within the calendar view to move them to a different day or time slot.

Nearly every page in the program has the ability to add tasks directly. This includes:

You will see the tasks block with its distinctive red/green/blue colors (note that the title of the block changes depending on where it is):

You can add a new task by clicking on the Add a new Task button. This will associate the task with parent. For example, if you are working on a case and add a task through the case's page, new tasks will have their category set to Client and the Case set to the case that you are working on.