Using Drindal to manage your tasks
Mostly Drindal is pretty self explanatory when you understand the process described in the overview, especially if you've used other task management tools, but a few things are unique to Drindal and could use some explaining.
One Board, Many Filters
The Board is the main view in Drindal. It shows tasks for a selected Filter. You create Filters to specify which tasks you want to see, based on choices like team, users, tags, keywords, etc.. You use saved filters to navigate your tasks by clicking on them in the navigation. Clicking a filter link is filtering which tasks you see and how you see them.
Drindal is unique in that all the tasks across all the teams you have access to are effectively available to be shown in the board at any time, all together or in any combination you like. The filter is the key to decide what you see and how to see it.
Create a Filter
Filters are created by viewing the details of an existing filter, making changes, including giving it a new name and then clicking the "Save As" button to create a new filter instead of updating the existing one.
Tags & Custom Fields
In Drindal, tags and custom fields are one in the same. They are data you set on a task defined by you and we refer to them all as Tags. Tags are a name and value pair but you don't have to provide a value. For example:
Name only tags
- Critical
- Bug
- Feature
- Kids
- Summer Trip
Name & value tags
- Size: M
- Customer: Joe's Gravel
- Annual Revenue: 1,200,000
- Feature: Super Button
- Status: Open
Do More With Tags
Tag Details
When setting a tag on a task, you can click the gear icon to define a set of fields on the tag. Values for the fields are then provided for each unique value of the tag, allowing you to drill down into the tag value for more information about that value. For example:
We have a "Customer" tag and we further setup it's details with the following fields:
- Contact
- Phone
- Address
- Annual Spend
Now we add the "Customer" tag to a task with the value being a customer name, "Madison Apples". When we view the task, we'll see an info icon next to the customer name and if we click it we'll get a dialog showing us a form with the tag's fields in it where we can enter values for the fields.
In this example we can tie tasks to our customers using the Customer tag and on any task we can simply click the info button next to the customer to see customer details.
We can also create a filter with the Tag Value Details view to show the details for all the values of a given tag. In this example, we'd have a filter that would show us all the values of the Customer tag and the associated details. Effectively, we get a table of customer details for any tasks and customers matching our filter.
