What is a task?

Tasks are small steps towards your goal. Properly written tasks help maintain a good pace and right direction. A title of a task can have a huge impact on productivity. A good task title usually has all these attributes:

  1. It must have a verb — an action, and an object to which the action must be applied. What needs to be done, what are we trying to achieve?
  2. It must be specific and have only one verb (action) in it. If there are two actions in a task — most probably they are two different tasks within the same story.
  3. It must be specific and to understand it you don't have to reconstruct the context and recall where you were when you came up with this task, what were you doing, what was the weather or what you had for lunch.
  4. If the title of a task seems too long, most probably, it is too long. Move details to the task description/details area and focus on point #1 on this list.
  5. There must be a defined expected result of completing a task or acceptance criteria. You need to understand when to stop and what is good enough. If it's not obvious, put it in the description.

Example of a bad title

  • Tasks on Facebook (see point #1)
  • Discussed tasks with Julia (see point #3)
  • Write a Facebook post about how to write tasks properly and put a link to it in Task Editor (see points #2 and #4)
  • Improve the landing page (see point #5)

Example of a good title

  • Write a Facebook post about how to write tasks properly
  • Put a link to the post about how to write tasks properly in Task Editor
  • Leave only one call to action on the landing page — sign up