Work management
Projects
Keys, colours, leads and status — and why the key is worth thinking about once.
A project is a body of work: a client engagement, a product, an internal stream. Every work item belongs to exactly one.
The key
Each project has a short uppercase key that prefixes its item keys — ERG-142. Numbers are issued per project and are gapless: the counter is incremented in the same operation that creates the item, so there is no sequence that can skip on a failure.
Pick the key carefully
It ends up in commit messages, branch names, chat and email. It is stored on the item rather than derived, so links and pasted references keep working — which also means changing it later leaves history pointing at the old prefix.
Colour is functional, not decoration
Each project carries a colour, used for the dot that identifies its rows. On a unified backlog mixing eight clients into one list, colour is what makes the mixture readable at a glance — it is doing the work a per-project view would otherwise do.
Status
| Status | Means |
|---|---|
| Active | Ordinary. Appears everywhere. |
| On hold | Paused. Still visible, still reportable. |
| Archived | Finished. Hidden from pickers by default; nothing is deleted. |
A project can carry a lead and a client. The client is a real company record, which is what lets one project’s hours be priced and invoiced and its costs reported per customer.
Deleting a project deletes its work
Boards and work items belong to the project and go with it. Archiving is the reversible option and is almost always the one you want.