Task Period Journal

This is the most “personal” space in Dendri. It includes a ToDo list where you can add tasks and include deadlines and descriptions; an open Notepad; and a History of prior task periods. The goal of the TPJ is to give you a space to personally organize “big picture” items that may not be related to a specific project, or, to help you organize your work without worrying about the more visual and team-based “Kanban” like card system used for tasks. It’s used for goal-setting, but also for tracking your progress.

So, for example, if you have a few things that you really want to knock out today you could add them as To Dos to keep track at the top of your dashboard. You can use the journal/notepad area to write out quick reminders, affirmations, or real-time thoughts about your progress.

Both the Notepad and the Todo list can be used independently, but, what’s unique is the history system.

At any point you can “Save” your task list and notepad. When you do this, you create a snapshot of your Todos and notes at that moment of time. Once you’ve done this, it gets added to your history and is frozen in time. You will also save a period snapshot when you clear completed tasks.

At any point, you can call up your history to look at all of your prior task periods by clicking “view all”

In this view, the tasks that were on your list at the time you saved (including any completed tasks) and your notes are not editable, this is a permanent record of that period in time. BUT, you can add comments. So, if you are tracking your progress over time, and you keep noticing that every time you go to get some work done, Steve from accounting calls you about an invoice you know nothing about you can mark poor Steve down as a blocker. It’s also useful to bring with you to team meetings or reviews so you can discuss blockers with your manager or team-mates. Based on the conversation you can record those notes and remember the actions taken.

This has a second function. As you can see from the visual history, any notes you place in the comments cell are visible when viewing your history. This has a secondary purpose:

This lets you “name” prior task periods. So you can use this to create recurrent task sets. For example, if you know that every Monday, you want to make sure you drink coffee, check your email, clock in, read buzzfeed, you can set those tasks and save them as a “Monday Morning task list.” This will also include any notes, links or other content you put in your notepad so you have quick access to any content you need for that task list.

Every Monday morning, you select that list from your past task periods and make it current.

Whenever you load an old list, it creates a history entry of your current list, and will save any changes or notes as a new history entry – it will never overwrite a prior period. Every time you save it creates a new entry. Think of it like using a paper journal. You can always transfer undone todos into the future, but you can't go back.

While this sounds complex, in practice, it lets you quickly jot down your todos, track your progress over time and flip back and forth between different sets of tasks, including recurring tasks, surfacing them only when you need them.

The goal is to learn to be more productive by spotting your blockers and celebrating your wins.

You can delete past task periods from the history window, but we recommend only using this if you've made a mistake.