Tuesday, 9:10am. Marta runs a six-person agency and sees 14 tasks marked as urgent on the list, though her team can only finish part of them by the end of the week. To set task priorities, she needs to separate the due date from the weight of the matter, and then show that decision to everyone it affects.
Why do all tasks suddenly become urgent?
All tasks become urgent when a team uses high priority instead of a shared selection rule. If nobody distinguishes a task's weight from its due date, every new request can end up with the same rank.
On Tuesday, Marta hears three phrases: "The client is waiting", "That was supposed to be done yesterday" and "We can't move forward without this". Each one describes a different problem. The first may concern an important relationship, the second a missed due date, the third a dependency between pieces of work. The word "urgent" alone doesn't let you decide what to do first.
Someone on the team gives a task without a due date a high priority, afraid of overlooking it. As a result, an offer needed on Thursday and an idea for a website change that nobody has yet agreed with the client end up side by side on the same list. Both have the same rank, though only one carries a commitment for this week.
The tool will show the shared list, but it won't make the decision for you. First, decide who settles disputes over rank and when the team should revisit that decision. If the problem already starts at the point of assigning responsibility, also see how to split tasks within a team.
You set task priorities by separating importance from the due date
You set task priorities by answering two questions: when must the matter be ready, and what happens if it isn't done. The first answer gives you a due date, the second helps you assign a rank. Don't let one replace the other.
On paper, you can use the Eisenhower matrix - splitting matters into four fields by urgency and importance. A task can be urgent and important, important without a near due date, urgent but of little importance to the company's goal, or neither urgent nor important. It's a way to talk about work, not a view or an automatic assessment in Task Manager.
On Wednesday, Marta takes on five matters from the agency. Three of them show why the due date alone isn't enough. The offer for client Nord must go out on Thursday, and without it the client won't make a decision - it gets a near due date and a high rank. The review of materials for the upcoming campaign is important, but scheduled for next week. A call about a minor fix is due today, though on its own it doesn't require rearranging the whole plan. Every matter goes on the list, but not every one needs a high priority.
Marta adopts her own rule: she highlights at most five tasks at a time, since that's how many her team decided to treat as top priority this week. It's a limit set by people, not a constraint of the software. When a sixth one comes along, she has to point out which of the existing ones will give up its place.
In the morning she asks herself: "What has to leave the company today?" If the answer is "the offer", that doesn't mean the other work is unimportant. It only means that not everything needs attention before the offer. A task without a due date also calls for a conscious decision: you can leave it without a date, but don't pretend it has the same due date as a commitment to a client.
Two priority values are enough, if the due date tells the rest
In Task Manager, you set a task's priority to normal or high, and give the due date separately. This way the team sees two different pieces of information: the rank of the work and the state of its due date. You set priority when creating a task or change it while editing.
On Wednesday morning, Marta opens the Marketing Workspace. In front of the status ring of a high-priority task, she sees an orange dot. For tasks with a due date, a circle shows the number of days until the date, or the number of days past it with a minus sign; hovering over it reveals the exact date. A task without a due date has no such circle.
The colour comes from the due date state, not from Marta's assessment: red means the due date has passed, blue means the due date is today, green means the due date is in the coming days. Grey means the task has no due date or is closed. These rules apply on the list, the Board, in the Calendar, and in the open task's info bar.
If you set a date without a time, the task stays "due today" until the end of the day, and it only turns red the following day. Done and cancelled tasks are not marked as overdue.
Above the list are the On schedule, Due today, Overdue and Chat tiles. They show counters, and clicking narrows the list; clicking again removes the narrowing. The priority filter works separately. So you can first check overdue matters, then use the filter to see high-priority tasks. The list can also be sorted by due date. Find out more about this kind of overview in the article on keeping track of task due dates in a team.
Task Manager doesn't have a five-level priority scale or custom rank labels. If your team needs such markers, two values might be too coarse. In Marta's agency, the split works differently: high priority highlights selected matters, while the due date lets you tell a task for today apart from one for next week.
Who changed the order? Check the task thread
When someone changes the priority, a system message with a timestamp appears in the task thread. It shows who raised the task's rank and when. A due date change is also recorded in the thread; the entry shows its previous value, so you can trace who moved the date and when. System entries also log changes to status, name and people assigned to the task.
On Thursday, Marek pushes back the due date of "Offer for client Nord" by two days. Marta doesn't have to guess whether she's looking at the original date: the thread holds a record of the change. The entry alone, however, doesn't explain why Marek made it. If the reason is a new request from the client, Marek should add it to the conversation on the task. Then the decision and its justification sit side by side.
Raising a priority leaves a similar trace. It doesn't, however, add an "(edited)" note to the task - that only appears after a change to the subject or description. When colleagues ask where the new order of priorities came from, check the thread instead of relying on memory from the last meeting.
Not everyone who follows a task needs it on their own to-do list. A watcher sees the task and its thread and can post messages, but doesn't edit the task or change its status. Watched tasks don't appear in their tiles or in the Today, Overdue and On time filters; they only get notified about mentions. This is useful for a manager who wants to know about decisions without treating every watched matter as their own deadline. A broader picture of working with tasks is covered in the guide to task management in a company.
You can ask AI for the list, but don't hand over the ranking
The AI Assistant can answer a question about your tasks and deadlines instead of making you scroll through the whole list by hand. It doesn't, however, set the priority for you - you're the one who decides which work comes first.
On Friday, Marta types: "Show my overdue tasks". Then, in the AI Assistant window, she types "priority high, status in progress" to filter the list. The Assistant operates within the permissions of the person asking; a new thread uses their tasks by default. When you need wider context, you can point to additional sources using the Sources button above the conversation.
One such source is the Calendar with task due dates and events. The default range covers 90 days ahead and 30 days back, though with a very dense calendar the AI Assistant may skip older entries and will let you know. Marta can therefore line up the offer's deadline against a meeting with the client, and then decide herself whether to raise its priority.
Conversations in the AI Assistant window are private, even from the administrator. You can ask for the result to be presented as a table, for example ahead of a Monday review. Check it before making a decision: AI can make mistakes, and its answer doesn't replace arrangements made with the client. See also how the AI Assistant works with tasks.
Check deadlines in the morning, strip outdated priority during the week
Priorities won't stay meaningful if you only ever add the "high" mark and never remove it. Set two check-in points: in the morning, review today's and overdue tasks, and once a week, check which tasks still deserve a high ranking.
Marta turns on the Daily task digest for 8:00 in Settings, in the Profile section. She gets one notification a day with the number and titles of her own unfinished, non-archived tasks due today and overdue. The digest doesn't include tasks she only watches. The in-app notification works even without an email being sent. An email while the app is closed requires a CRON job set up on the server, i.e. a recurring technical task.
For a matter that's important but not yet urgent, Marta can request a reminder for "the day before the due date". If the task's due date shifts, the reminder shifts along with it. It's only created once confirmed in the confirmation window. Without a due date on the task, a reminder can't be pinned to its date - it stays a plain reminder for a specific time.
A large task doesn't have to be "high" just because it has many stages. In the description, you can add a To-do list: participants tick off points on the task card, see a shared progress bar and a signature next to each completed item. This shows what's already been done, but doesn't change the task's priority. How to work with such a list is covered in To-do list in a task and chat.
On Monday, Marta sorts tasks by due date, checks the ones marked as high and lowers the priority of one that no longer needs to come first. In the thread, she also checks who moved the Nord offer's due date and whether Marek added the reason. Now her team can see the offer's deadline and the priority of the remaining work separately.
Task Manager's licence is perpetual: you pay once for the number of seats, with no per-user subscription; it includes 12 months of updates, after which renewal is optional. The Standard variant in the Starter plan for up to 8 people costs PLN 690.
Tomorrow morning, count the high-priority tasks and remove that mark from the ones that don't need to come first this week. If you'd like to see such a list in the program, open the Demo.
Frequently asked questions
How many priorities does a task have in Task Manager?
A task has two priorities: normal and high. High is marked with an orange dot on the list, and the due date state is shown with a separate colour.
Does Task Manager show the Eisenhower matrix?
No, the Eisenhower matrix is a method for organising matters, not a Task Manager feature. You can save the result of your assessment as a normal or high priority and a task due date.
How do you quickly see urgent tasks on the list?
The Due today and Overdue tiles narrow the list by due date state, and you choose high-priority tasks with a separate filter. Tiles are not a rank filter.
Can you see who raised the priority or moved the due date?
Yes, priority and due date changes stay in the thread as system messages with a time stamp. For due date changes, the previous value is also shown.
Will the AI Assistant set task priorities on its own?
No, the AI Assistant does not decide a task's rank for you. It can answer questions about the tasks and due dates available to you and filter the list within its own window.
Sources
The Task Manager Team - we write about teamwork, AI in business and keeping tasks organised, using examples from Task Manager, software installed on your own server. Task Manager has been developed by Blue Creation Group (Piotr Łącz) since 2013 and is used by organisations including Neonet, the Military University of Technology and Polpharma - read customer reviews. We check our articles against the user guide and the latest version of the software.
