Work and tasks

A task belongs to one of three places, and the difference matters because it changes who can see it:

• On a project. The ordinary case. A task sits in a phase of a project (General Tasks, Pre-Production, Production, Post-Production) or on one of the project's shots. A shot task still counts toward the project as a whole.
• On nothing, as a general task. A loose task with no project, for a job too small to deserve one. You can still put a client's name on it, so "ring Vosseveld back about the invoice" stays attached to who it is about without needing a project. The New task popup in the top bar is the fast way to make one from wherever you are. It offers people, projects and companies to attach it to.
• On a shot, inside a walkthrough. While you are doing a voice walkthrough of a board with someone, you can write a task mid-sentence by pointing at a card. It remembers which card and which second of the recording it came from, so "make this warmer" is a task about something in particular.

The dashboard splits these into two sections: General Tasks for the loose ones, and My Project Tasks for everything you hold on a project.

The fastest way is the quick-add strip at the bottom of any chapter on a project page. Type a title, press Enter, done.

For the things your studio does on every job, there is a shortcut. The ☰ button on a project's header (and on each task chapter) opens Standard tasks, your studio's own running list: Moodboard, Script, Storyboard, Scope, Compositing, Editing, Sound design, that sort of thing. Tick what this project needs and each line becomes a task in its stage. Lines already on the project show as already here, so the list doubles as a way to see how far along you are. You extend the list itself with + Add Task to list, and every future project can draw from it.

A shot has its own, separate standard list. The same ☰, but on the Tasks heading inside an opened shot, opens a second list: Scene blocking, Lighting, Shading, Animation, and so on. It is kept apart from the project list because what a job always needs and what a shot always needs are rarely the same things.

There are two ways work moves onto somebody, and the difference is who decides:

• A lead assigns. If you have the right to hand out work, either project-wide or over the studio's general tasks, putting somebody's name on a task lands immediately. No agreement needed.
• Anybody else offers. Without that right, you can still pick work up yourself, or hand something you are holding to a colleague by offering it. The hand-over icon on a task row opens a small panel: "Ask a colleague to take this on. It stays yours until they say yes." You pick somebody, add an optional note, and press Offer it. It shows as Out with <name> until they answer Accept or No thanks, and you can always Take the offer back while it is still pending.

Assigning lands, offering waits for a yes. A lead runs the job and decides who is on what. A colleague handing work sideways needs the other person's agreement, because they are not the one who makes that call for someone else.

Every task carries a status that the person holding it sets themselves:

• Not started
• In progress
• Waiting, on somebody else. There is no separate status for a pause, because waiting already means "this isn't moving and it isn't my move." A pause button on a row toggles straight into this state. Toggling it back off resumes to In progress if there was already some progress logged, or Not started if there was not.
• Review requested

This is your own read on your own work. It has nothing to do with a client being asked to look at something in review, which is a separate part of the product; Review requested on a task does not mean a client has seen anything.

Priority is a single 1–5 scale shared by tasks and deals, so "priority 2" means the same thing everywhere in Kadrenta. The five values, from most to least urgent, are Critical, High, Normal, Low, Someday. Most forms show a simpler three-way picker, High, Medium, Low, because nobody meaningfully separates Someday from Low while typing a title. That picker is a view onto the same column, not a second one, so opening a Someday task later and saving without touching priority nudges it to Low.

Deadlines are separate from priority, and they drive their own warning colour on a task's pill: caution inside a week, and critical inside three days, which covers a task that is due today or already late.

Three figures sit at the top of the dashboard:

• Open tasks: everything of yours that is not finished.
• Waiting: on somebody else.
• Due today or overdue: only shown when it is not zero.

The first two are shown even at zero. An empty open tasks count is a real answer to the question you opened the dashboard with, how much is on my plate. An overdue count of zero is an answer nobody was asking for; you check a warning to be told when something is wrong. So Open tasks and Waiting always show, even as a bare zero, and the overdue figure disappears entirely when there is nothing to say.

Open tasks and Waiting count what you personally hold: any task with your name on it, anywhere, plus any loose task nobody has picked up that you wrote yourself. It does not count a pile of unassigned project tasks nobody has claimed. That would answer a different question than "what am I actually doing."

Pressing Open tasks or Waiting scrolls you to the My Project Tasks section, which already lists those rows. Pressing Due today or overdue opens the same popup as the warning chip described below.

The ⚠ chip in the top bar carries a count of everything due today or already past its deadline, on every page. Press it and a popup titled Due today or overdue lists them, oldest deadline first. The ones that have been waiting longest sort to the top; a task due today sorts to the bottom, after everything properly late. When there is nothing to show, it says so: "Nothing is due today or overdue."

A task does not turn overdue in the background at midnight and get reported later. Kadrenta only checks for newly-overdue tasks, and notifies the people on them, when somebody in that studio opens the dashboard. Doing it on a schedule would mean giving a background process the ability to read task data and write notifications on its own, and that door is kept closed. The cost is that a studio nobody opens for a few hours gets its deadline reminders a few hours late. Studios in active use notice within minutes.

You see every task on a project you are part of, assigned to you or not, with one exception: a private task. Marking a task private is for the kind of thing that is noise for everyone but its owner. Nobody else ever sees it, and there is no switch that opens it up. Not your teammates, and, in the product's own words, "not your admin" either. A private task belongs to one person.

That promise means the product never shows it to anyone else, not that it is impossible to reach by other means; whoever administers the database itself always could, on any system.