Some pieces of work are big, and some are small.

When managing big pieces of work, you need to break them down into small pieces, for a bunch of reasons:

• You need to forecast when the work will be done, and "Remodel the house" is harder to forecast than "Install the drawer pulls."
• You need to track when work is added or removed from the initial batch. If, midway through the project, you discover your ceiling contains asbestos, things are going to take a little longer.
• You need to prioritize the steps appropriately. "Insulate the walls" needs to come before "Paint the walls", or things aren't going to go well for you.
• ...etc.

No matter what project management philosophy you follow, this is a universal truth: You've got to be able to subdivide your projects into manageable tasks.

The trick is that most of the tools we use to manage our projects get messy once you do that. The primary reason they don't handle subproject complexity well, is that they just dump all those sub-project tasks into the same to-do list as all the other work. This creates clutter and confusion.

For example, maybe you intend to write a book, and it's going to have ten chapters. So you make ten cards in your tool. But you've also got fifty other things in your backlog. You don't want to have to drag those ten cards up and down the list as your priorities change.

Some tools let you manage that work by creating a checkbox list inside your project. But then there's no way to tell how long those boxes took to check, or which things are currently being worked on.

Some tools let you tag a bunch of tasks, to show they're all part of the same project. Which helps! But you're still dragging and filtering and dealing with a lot of cognitive overhead, and a poor visualization of what you need to do.

The approach we've taken is to let you convert a normal Task card to a special type of card called a Project. You can then create Task cards inside that Project card. You can drag that Project up and down your backlog, and all the child tasks will come along for the ride, without you doing anything else.

Furthermore, the Project's forecast will be based on the number of children inside it. If you've got a big deadline coming up, you'll know exactly how you're trending, at all times. Those child tasks will also be reflected in all the advice we give you in the Insights section.

We think you're going to love how this works, and how it simplifies how you think about long-term efforts.

To get started, just create a task like normal, open it up, and click the "Convert to Project" button. It's that easy!

More to come...

—Evan