Sometimes we need to make time to get things done. When you work with other people it&rsquo;s easy to end up accepting a lot of meeting requests and other demands on your time. You still have your own tasks and work to get done though, and if you don&rsquo;t make some time for that it will often find its way to the bottom of the priority list.&nbsp;
Untasked has allowed you to schedule a task from day one. If you want to make sure that a task is associated with a particular day or time, you can make that decision and see it reflected in untasked immediately. It&rsquo;s a great way to plan your approach and sequence tasks.
Now you can take scheduling a step forward and integrate your untasked scheduled tasks into your regular calendar.
Simply go to your <a href="https://app.untasked.me/settings">settings</a> in untasked and turn on &ldquo;Export task calendar for other applications&rdquo;
<img alt="setting to turn on calendar integration" title="Calendar integration" src="https://www.datocms-assets.com/49982/1638836187-calendar-integration.png" />and untasked will give you a new calendar feed link you can add to the calendar of your choice, bringing your scheduled tasks right onto your regular calendar.

Making time for tasks with calendar integration

Untasked users have been able to publish their capabilities within their organizations for months now and we are starting to see some great uses. Capabilities make it easy to get started on new work without a lot of back and forth trying to exchange basic information. In that big organization when you need to work with someone you may not know, they can save you a lot of time.
&nbsp;The next evolution of capabilities is designed to make life easier for the smaller companies and people who may be working more often with people who aren&rsquo;t a part of the company. Starting today you can create a capability, make it &ldquo;public&rdquo; and share the link with anyone. Now people outside of your organization can trigger one of your capabilities, and the task will show up for you in untasked and run through the workflow and capability process you have already set up.
<img src="https://www.datocms-assets.com/49982/1637176733-external-capability.png" width="507" height="763" />
This means that you can accept external requests for work and gather the same kind of context information from a customer, partner, new lead, or anyone, and have it seamlessly flow into your existing untasked workspace.
Capabilities are a powerful tool to connect the work you do to your customers, and now that customer can be anyone. Start simplifying your work intake process today with a <a href="https://app.untasked.me/signup" title="Sign up">free trial of untasked</a>&nbsp;and connect better than ever before with you team, company or external partners.
Every capability can have a workflow attached, allowing you to build complex multi-stage paths for the created task without writing any code.
Find out more about capabilities in this video
<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/8HJ1PfFQwh0" title="YouTube video player" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>

Capabilities can now be used outside of your organization.

Capabilities Unleashed

It has been a busy few weeks here at untasked headquarters. Bug squashing everywhere as we move from invitation only beta to general availability for anyone who wants to give it a try.&nbsp;
That&rsquo;s right, you can now sign up for a free trial of untasked even without knowing someone who works on it. We do eventually plan on charging people, but you can use the <a href="https://app.untasked.me/signup">free trial</a> to be convinced before you pay anything, or try and friend one of us on linked in to score one of those hard to get beta invites. &nbsp;&nbsp;
For those of you who have already been improving your life, we have quite a few changes that you might notice.
<ul>
 <li>We have changed the avatars to have a picture if it&rsquo;s available and initials if not, more support of picture-based avatars is on the list and coming soon.</li>
 <li>You can now add post completion questions to capabilities and get a second round of questions.</li>
 <li>Superpowers menu now 100% sure to get you to the right place instead of 95% sure.</li>
 <li>Recurring tasks do the right thing when you tag them</li>
</ul>
<img src="https://www.datocms-assets.com/49982/1634672198-screen-shot-2021-10-19-at-12-11-45-pm.png" width="349" height="325" />
<ul>
 <li>Untasked is more personal. Literally. Every user gets a personal tag that they can apply to those tasks they want to keep private. New users only, though you can make one for yourself if your account pre-dates this.</li>
 <li>It&rsquo;s easier to trigger a someone else&rsquo;s capability from the task editor with several new capability commands.</li>
 <li>6% more typescript</li>
 <li>The main editor better manages to be the right width for whatever screen size you are working with.</li>
 <li>There are several new buttons in the details area for work timer, repetition and clearing dates.</li>
</ul>
<img src="https://www.datocms-assets.com/49982/1634672307-2021-10-19-11-43-12.gif" />
<ul>
 <li>When you are in that zoom meeting and someone says they completed a task, but they haven&rsquo;t updated it yet in untasked you can now check it off for them by entering something like `completed by Jared yesterday`</li>
 <li>Help is much more helpful, and specific to what you are doing.</li>
 <li>More than 1 but less than 20 new tooltips</li>
 <li>Block headers are now much better spaced and show the right words in the right lines of text.</li>
 <li>Some big backend updates that you won&rsquo;t see but will let us improve search and make it approximately google times easier to find what you are looking for, as long as what you are looking for is a task or something like a task.</li>
 <li>Clicking on a tag in a very specific way wasn&rsquo;t working right. It took us a lot of time, but now you can click on a tag any way you want. Just go ahead and click on them.</li>
 <li>You can now choose to have a beautiful status report emailed to you every week in your &lsquo;subscription settings&rsquo;</li>
 <li>Workflow editor not only continues to work, but has several improvements to make it continue to work even better than ever before.</li>
</ul>
&nbsp;

Untasked release notes, and announcing general availability

Release Notes: General availability!

Big update today, so let's get right to it.
This is the biggest release since last week, but also includes some features that have been long contemplated.
Work today... it sure is something. Our goal is to give you all the help we can. When we get it right it's about using a small amount of your time to generate a larger impact. The status reports we generate for you every week are one example of that, but we want to do more.
Tags are already a powerful way to keep your tasks organized. We started out with a few little pictures you could add, but that wasn't enough. They also didn't really care about your color preference. Most upsetting to some was that they had a border radius that was not inline with our standards. Prepare to be shocked and amazed with the anatomy of the new tag
<img alt="tag diagram" title="Tag Anatomy" src="https://www.datocms-assets.com/49982/1630100436-tag-anatomy.svg" />
Now instead of picking between our very limited set icons you have full access to one of humanities greatest forms of expression. The emoji. &nbsp;Here at untasked, our average dog is a lot more like this one&nbsp;🐕, you can choose your own favorite dog, or any other emoji from the approximately 3,353 available (Note: that number is also the approximate number of takes that the below masterpiece animation took to get almost correct, but that's the kind of time you have available to you when you use untasked.)
<img src="https://www.datocms-assets.com/49982/1630102110-puppies2.gif" />
But wait... The improvements to tags aren't just emoji related, that would be like just adding a new cape on a super hero you already know. To really give tags, and you through them, super powers we need adding a tag to mean something. This is a growing feature, but we are going to start you off with two new behaviors you can add to your tags.
<ol>
 <li>untasked has a pretty big no code workflow system, which is a trendy way of saying we let you define things that should happen to tasks when certain criteria are met. You can define this for yourself or your organization. It's a great way to make sure certain things happen, and a lot of capabilities have them built in. Now, you can define a tag, let's say&nbsp;<img src="https://www.datocms-assets.com/49982/1630103840-mine.png" width="67" height="21" style="letter-spacing: 0px;" />&nbsp;and then define a work flow that assigned the task to you, scheduled it for the next business day, and added a note letting everyone know that you were working on it. All just from a single tag. I told you there would be super powers.</li>
 <li>One of the biggest things people have been asking for is a way to separate their work tasks from their non-work tasks. Now you can through the power of the personal tag. We aren't going to tell you what to call it, but you can now when creating a new tag (or editing an existing one) tell us that you want to use the tag to indicate something private. &nbsp;Any task you add this tag to will be for you and you alone.</li>
</ol>
<img src="https://www.datocms-assets.com/49982/1630102654-tag-personal.png" width="582" height="347" />
Marketing said I should count this as two unique things on the list, but engineering starts counting at 0 so... This also works for a group within&nbsp;untasked. If you make the tag manager a group you are a member of you can use the same effect to make something "Group restricted". &nbsp;Now your tasks can be personal to just you and however many friends are in your group.
Capabilities are another part of how we hope to make your day easier, and they can already trigger all kinds of workflows and events, but until now it wasn't the easiest to find and see at a glance who was using your capabilities, and see the tasks associated with them. Now it's easy to see the details on each capability, and where you stand with the tasks that come from them.
<img src="https://www.datocms-assets.com/49982/1630098886-capabilities.png" />
All you have to do is click to get a new item on your desk showing the tasks associated with a capability. Keep it around all the time or just dismiss once you have what you need.
We rolled all this up into something that's always at your fingertips, the new Super powers menu.
<img src="https://www.datocms-assets.com/49982/1630104212-screen-shot-2021-08-27-at-3-42-56-pm.png" width="160" height="178" />
You have no idea how hard it is to name things. We are working on it. In it you will find your capabilities, and also your most recent and frequently used tags, with quick access to the associated tasks. <a href="mailto://help@untasked.me" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Let us know what you think?</a>
Last but not least&nbsp;this week we added a way to get a bunch of tasks into&nbsp;untasked quickly. &nbsp;Say for example you already had a to do list in top notch order. Just hop over to the import/export section, and you can paste in tasks to your hearts content.
<img src="https://www.datocms-assets.com/49982/1630105429-import-tasks.gif" />&nbsp;
Next week tune into this channel for a release notes update that just says
<blockquote>
 Bug fixes and performance improvements
</blockquote>

Release Notes: Introducing super powers

Lots of improvements to untasked in today's release. Some specifically related to the word 'at'
<ul>
 <li>Add tag interface now automatically adds when you match, or click on a tag. Tag faster than ever before.</li>
 <li>Improvements to sign up experience</li>
 <li>Search filters so you can narrow your searches to just your tasks</li>
 <li>When editing done tasks they are no longer crossed out while you are trying to type.</li>
 <li>You shouldn't see followup prompts that don't have questions</li>
 <li>Automatic time and date detection now detects even more dates even if you use the word &lsquo;at&rsquo;&nbsp;</li>
 <li>In one very specific place we no longer capitalize the word &lsquo;at&rsquo;, this is completely unrelated to the previous note.</li>
 <li>Improvements behind the scenes so we can help keep your org and team invitations healthy and happy.</li>
</ul>

Release Notes: 8/19/2021

Every time something goes wrong, a new process gets its wings. While those new processes might start out as angels, if you aren&rsquo;t keeping an eye on them, they will turn on you and kill your team&rsquo;s productivity.
All of these processes are well meaning, and certainly start off with the best intentions, but it&rsquo;s critical to look at them all together and assess what&rsquo;s actually working.
<h2>To err is human</h2>
It all starts out innocently: someone makes a mistake or some small thing goes wrong. It might be a big deal, or maybe just a "let&rsquo;s watch out for that in the future&rdquo; kind of thing. Wherever it falls on the spectrum, someone decides it shouldn&rsquo;t happen again. As an organization that learns from mistakes, there is nothing wrong with that.
Sometimes there is a post mortem (or some other analysis) to figure out what went wrong, and where we could have stopped it. Sometimes it&rsquo;s just a knee-jerk reaction to insert some kind of approval or double check. There are even problems that are solved by adding a new person to the company. Hindsight makes these problems easy to solve&hellip;in reverse.
We put a bandage on that still open wound and salvage some victory out of it. Even if we messed up, at least we learned something, and made sure it will never happen again (or so we think). Often we are under stress when we make these decisions, and that perfect hindsight isn&rsquo;t as perfect as we hoped.
If we only made one mistake in our lifetime, this would probably work great, but oh, humanity! We are flawed. Most of us make quite a few mistakes, and the difference between being good at our jobs or not is often just having made all the mistakes in a previous role and learning what not to do again.
<h2>How do people get so bogged down?</h2>
As time passes, each and every one of these patches, big and small, from across the organization, start to add up. Some of them are huge, and come from the top, some are personal and represent the lessons learned and only apply to you. Combined, they turn into the fabric of an organization and the informal version of "the way things get done&rdquo;.
We all remember the last time we learned a lesson, but who remembers the last time you removed a process that no longer applies?
Every process from across the team has an influence. You intuitively know what your team can get done quickly and what is going to take forever. That&rsquo;s your internal knowledge of the informal map; getting directions from point now to done. You know that the first part is easy because you can do it yourself, but then you have to ask Steve for a product code, and that always takes 2 days, Jane needs the product code before she can confirm the lead time, so you can&rsquo;t start that until you have it.
We are actually pretty good at figuring this all out, but our natural reaction is to let the time stack up. At some point, if we hit our limits, it&rsquo;s a natural tendency to just go with the flow and slow down to the speed that lets everything happen the way it has always happened.
When things get extreme you will actually see people doing extra work because they know that the process doesn&rsquo;t accommodate what they need, or let them get things done. It&rsquo;s easier to do it themselves than to do it the right way. Just like that, your process to prevent mistakes is worthless.
<h2>Is it a teardown or a fixer upper?</h2>
You may have a sneaking suspicion that things are moving too slowly, or that it is just a little too difficult to get things done. Maybe you have been around for a few years and remember the good old days when everything just seemed to happen. This is the opportunity to realign your process with productivity.
If you have this feeling, you are almost certainly right, but you really want to get a sense for the scope of the problem before you start making changes. People are generally uncomfortable with change. Remember, your &lsquo;wasted time&rsquo; is someone else&rsquo;s &lsquo;primary job responsibility&rsquo;. One great technique for getting a handle on this is to do a quick visualization exercise (If this isn't quick, you know your answer).
Get one other person who works in the same space as you and an empty whiteboard. Start with the creation of the task in question, that moment someone decides &lsquo;I think we should do this&rsquo;, and draw out everything that needs to happen before it&rsquo;s done. Put in the decisions, approvals, reviews, etc. If you get to something you know happens, but don&rsquo;t have a detailed understanding of yourself, see if you can get the person who does to join you for a few minutes to explain what happens in that part of the process. Don&rsquo;t worry about why things are happening at this stage, this is just the &lsquo;do we have a problem&rsquo; test.
<img alt="Complex process" src="https://www.datocms-assets.com/49982/1627860122-martijn-baudoin-4h0hqc3k4-c-unsplash.jpg" title="Photo by &lt;a href=&quot;https://unsplash.com/@martijnbaudoin?utm_source=unsplash&amp;utm_medium=referral&amp;utm_content=creditCopyText&quot;&gt;Martijn Baudoin&lt;/a&gt; on &lt;a href=&quot;https://unsplash.com/s/photos/mess?utm_source=unsplash&amp;utm_medium=referral&amp;utm_content=creditCopyText&quot;&gt;Unsplash&lt;/a&gt; " />
When (if?) you get to the end and look at what you have produced, the answer will be pretty clear. Do you have something on the whiteboard that pretty much anyone could understand, and could fit on a single piece of paper? Or is it more like trying to <a href="https://preview.redd.it/8us2znd2jac61.png?width=12077&amp;format=png&amp;auto=webp&amp;s=770c1ac591912196a644ac5d095dff98c3477ac5" target="_blank" rel="noopener">explain what happened in a Christopher Nolan movie</a>? Did you get to something understandable with just two people, or are you now surrounded by a crowd of co-workers all wondering how (and maybe why) they got here?
It should be pretty obvious if you have something where you can improve with fine tuning, or if you need to build up something new from scratch.
<h2>Look at the whole problem</h2>
Once you understand how big this is, it&rsquo;s time to start working on an approach. The most important part of this, no matter the scope of the problem, is to focus on the sum total of what you want the end state to look like. Ask yourself, what is the essential value you are creating through your work? What can we do to align the process, something that exists to make the work error free, to support your efforts rather than standing in the way.&nbsp;
<blockquote>
 What is the essential value you are creating through your work? What can we do to align the process, something that exists to make the work error free, to support your efforts rather than standing in the way.&nbsp;
</blockquote>
Often, all the right things are getting done, and it&rsquo;s as simple as starting at different times, or connecting the results from one team directly to the next stage. The solutions will be very different in every organization. Sometimes it&rsquo;s about setting up placeholders (like getting those product codes set up so there is always one ready to go). You may find that all you need to do is go through and take out all the repetition. If 10 people need to touch something as it moves forward and each one needs to approve it, would it work if they all approved it together at the end? Even better, could they do their approval on a limited version so that it was clear that this was going the right direction before people put in a lot of effort?
<h2>Make sure people understand the entry point</h2>
Every so often we do work in our area of expertise for other people or teams in the company. This can readily become a source of friction because our work has a unique language, context, or approach that is just a bit different than the other team who has their own specialization.
These points of intersection, where different parts of the organization are forced to stop, figure out what the other needs, and translate across specialties are often fraught with miscommunication. If things fall apart at the beginning it can take a lot of time and meetings to get everyone back on the same page.
You can help prevent this by paying extra attention to the entry point for your work and any processes you set up for other people. There are usually parts of your work that only you can do while there are also things the person requesting the work has already figured out or has strong opinions about. These pre-decided elements are critical context if you want to deliver the right results.
You are going to make this entry point the best way to get this thing done, don&rsquo;t let people go around it. Intake should happen one way, however you choose to do it. You have done the work to make your process efficient, it&rsquo;s not like before where entering at any point will work. There are no extra steps.
<h2>Context is efficient&hellip;and kind</h2>
When you think about intake, think about those questions and the context you need answered to make progress, and do the right thing. These things are obvious to you, but this is for people who may not really understand what you do; they are seeking you out for your expertise after all.
Imagine you only get to talk with the person you are doing something for <a href="http://tinyartdirector.blogspot.com">just this one time</a>. They have to convey what&rsquo;s special, important, and meaningful about this job so you have the context to make good decisions as you do your part. Every time you have to stop in the middle of the work, and go back to them, you are going to slow down, be interrupted and interrupt someone else. If you are lucky that&rsquo;s a 15 minute phone call, but let's be honest here&hellip;
Get the context you need in that first touch point.
<h2>Every hour won back is a prize</h2>
Each improvement in productivity is a win, because if you can get the busy work done faster, you can focus on doing the work you love, and get more of the right things done. It's true that there is always more to do, but a satisfying work experience improves a big chunk of our waking hours. Getting more done in the same amount of time lets us spend more time with the people we love, or doing things we enjoy. Faster response times make happier customers, and co-workers. Don&rsquo;t let process kill your productivity.
untasked is designed to help you get things done, with the right amount of process for the problems you face every day. We can&rsquo;t do your work for you, but we can make process and working across teams a little easier. With as much or little process as *you* want. It&rsquo;s as simple as:
<ul>
 <li>Define your capabilities, those entry points for getting access to your time and effort.</li>
 <li>Automatically gather the context you need to deliver with confidence, right up front.</li>
 <li>That task is now in front of you, and you can manage it in the way that works for you.</li>
 <li>Attach a workflow if you have defined a complex path, or just do the work and pass it to the next stage when you are ready.</li>
 <li>The person who requested it is always in the loop, and can see exactly where their request is in the process. No more &lsquo;just checking in on this&hellip;&rsquo; emails to answer.&nbsp;</li>
</ul>
<h3>Get work done. Get untasked.</h3>

Process can get in the way of your productivity, don't let it keep you from getting things done.

Your Process is Killing Productivity

Recently the New York Times took aim at office culture, more specifically the idea that putting all the people together in one place leads to some kind of special magic that you can&rsquo;t get any other way. The <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/23/upshot/remote-work-innovation-office.html">article</a> is perhaps best summarized with this quote
<blockquote cid="n2" mdtype="blockquote">
 &ldquo;All of this suggests to me that the idea of random serendipity being productive is more fairy tale than reality,&rdquo; 
 Ethan S. Bernstein (Harvard Business School)
</blockquote>
For decades we have all been told that workplaces that look like busy beehives are happy, productive, and effective. People bouncing around, interacting will inevitably produce better results. Ask anyone who has tried to do complex solo work in an open office space and you will quickly hear a different story.
Have we set up our work infrastructure for a kind of appearance of business and communication that looks good from above, but actually makes it more difficult to get things done? Have we actually designed our workplaces for extroverts who like to socialize? 
Most work goes though several stages, maybe some discussion, ideation, creative work at the beginning, then a team or individual gets the implementation done. The first phase is usually glamorized, exciting, and the highest profile, but most of the actual work is in that second phase.
For some professions, that implementation phase is actually incredibly focused and one interruption can cost a ton of time.
<img src="https://www.datocms-assets.com/49982/1627865219-dollar-gill-ic5f0ozntlw-unsplash.jpg" title="Photo by @dollargil (Unsplash)" />
Great work isn&rsquo;t an accident, or serendipity. It&rsquo;s the effort, talent, skill and grit that takes you from an idea to an outcome. At untasked we believe that this is what we should be optimizing for. Your ability to spend your work time focused on the problem you are trying to solve. 
We all need space to do our best work. Sometimes this space is about time and opportunity, sometimes it's about being able to keep all the moving parts in one place. At that moment when you are getting ready to get something done there is no substitute for having everything you need at your fingertips, and being able tune out the distractions. Setting up that environment for yourself is one way to set yourself up for success.
When you know how to do it, and just need to manage a backlog, we let you automate the intake work by defining your own capabilities so no one needs to stop getting things done to talk about getting things done.
When it&rsquo;s more complicated, we let you work with people so everyone can keep their eye on things while staying focused on their part.
So many of the tools for work these days seem to make your computer just another way to let the open office get past your headphones. We designed untasked to be like your own office with a door. It&rsquo;s not about serendipity, it&rsquo;s about getting your best work done.

It's not about bumping into people, it's about getting things done.

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