Tasks

A Task is the most concrete thing in askTheodor: one specific piece of work. “Draft the launch email”, “research three competitors”, “fix the broken signup form”. If a Plan is the project and a Goal is the ambition, a Task is the actual to-do that gets done.

Tasks are how work flows to your Workers — whether you create one by hand, Theodor hands one out, or a Plan dispatches a whole batch of them.

What a Task carries

• A title and description — what needs doing.
• One optional assignee — the single Worker responsible. A task can also sit unassigned in a triage pile until you decide who takes it.
• Optional Project and Goal links — to group it under a larger effort and align it to an aim.
• Priority and a due date — low, normal, high, or urgent; with an optional deadline.
• Dependencies — a task can be blocked by other tasks, so it won’t start until they’re done.
• Recurrence — a task can repeat daily, weekly, monthly, or yearly; finishing one automatically creates the next.

The status flow

Every Task moves through a small set of statuses:

todo → in_progress → review → done

with three off-ramps for when things don’t go to plan: blocked, cancelled, or failed.

Workers are coached to leave finished work in review (so you can take an optional glance) before it’s truly done. When a task is being worked on, it links back to the conversation where the work is happening, so its card can jump you straight into the chat.

Where Tasks live

Tasks belong to a Company and appear on a Kanban board under Company → Tasks — columns you drag cards across as work progresses. You’ll also see a worker’s open tasks on its profile.

Be specific

A good task reads like a clear instruction: “Summarize this PDF into five bullets and save it to the Library” beats “look at this”. The crisper the task, the better the result.

Tasks inside Plans

When a task is part of a Plan, a background scheduler manages its status, retries, and dependencies for you. A freestanding task you make yourself behaves exactly as you’d expect, with none of that machinery in the way.

In practice

Write the acceptance criteria into the description. The single biggest quality lever. Instead of “research competitors”, write what a finished result contains: “For each of these three URLs: their pricing tiers, what’s included, and one line on positioning. Output a table. Save it to the Library as ‘Pricing scan — July’.” A worker can’t infer the format you had in mind, and review is faster when you already know what you asked for.

Use blocked by rather than doing the sequencing yourself. If a task genuinely can’t start until another finishes, link them. Otherwise a worker may start early and produce something based on material that isn’t ready yet — which looks like a model failure but is a dependency you didn’t declare.

Recurrence suits fixed cadences, not “sometime soon”. A weekly report or a monthly reconciliation is a good recurring task. A vague “check on this periodically” produces a backlog of unfinished cards that makes the board useless. If you wouldn’t put it in a calendar, don’t make it recur.

Leaving work in review is the default for a reason. If you find every task going straight to done, either your workers are configured to skip the holding state or you’re approving without reading. Both are worth checking — review is where you catch drift before it compounds.

A stalled board is a signal, not a nuisance

Cards stuck in blocked or in_progress for days usually mean the task was too big or its brief was ambiguous. The fix is to split it, not to nudge the worker again.

🎓 Learn it hands-on: Tasks, review & done

Terms in this page

• Task — one concrete unit of work, with a status, an optional single assignee, and optional links to a Project and Goal.
• Assignee — the one Worker responsible for a task (a task may also be unassigned).
• Worker / persona — a configured AI character that can be assigned tasks; see Workers.
• Project — a grouping of related tasks within a Company.
• Goal — a higher-level aim a task can be aligned to.
• Blocked by / dependency — another task that must finish before this one can start.
• Status — where a task is in its lifecycle: todo, in_progress, review, done, blocked, cancelled, or failed.
• Review — a holding state meaning “the work is there; take a look if you want” before it’s marked done.
• Kanban board — a columns-and-cards view (todo / in progress / done, etc.) you drag tasks across to track progress.
• Recurrence — a rule that re-creates a task on a repeating schedule once it’s completed.
• Scheduler — the background helper that advances tasks belonging to a Plan; see Plans.