Tasks Without Dates

When adding tasks via certain methods, Workzone will create the tasks without a start or end date. Also, dates on existing tasks can be removed. Dateless tasks can be useful when a task needs to serve as a placeholder or doesn't have any particular timeframe or deadline.

Creating Dateless Tasks

To establish a task without any start or end date, you can either edit an existing task, or create one or more new tasks (or a new project with tasks).

Editing an existing task to remove its dates is done by clicking on the date on the task's row listed under the START or END column in the main Projects area. Once the date is selected, it can be removed by pressing the delete key on the keyboard and pressing the return key or clicking elsewhere within Workzone. Dateless tasks can have dates added using the same method.

Also, you can edit multiple tasks at once and check the Remove Dates checkbox (clicking Modify These Items to confirm), as seen here:

Creating a project with new tasks (or adding tasks to an existing project) in Workzone using the following methods will result in the new tasks having no dates:

• Use existing template (when "no dates" is selected, or when the template contains tasks without dates, more on this below)
• Lay out tasks in outline form
  
• Create placeholder task(s)
  
• Import tasks from Excel (when the dates are left empty in the import source)
• Add a Single Task into a Project
• Creating new tasks via API Access

Durations, Work, and Dependencies

Newly created tasks without dates (created using the methods described above) will also not display or include any duration/work values, unless specified using methods such as templates or importing. After the task is created, adding a duration or work value is done by clicking the plus (+) icon in the column for that task's row in the main Projects area.

If an existing task is dateless, it can also be set with an empty value for duration, or a duration can be assigned while still maintaining no dates. If there is no duration value, the task's work value will also be empty, and the reverse is also true. Removing a work value will also empty a task's duration. A detailed explanation of the general usage of duration and work can be found here.

While dateless tasks can be linked together with dependencies, linking a task with dates as a predecessor to a dateless task will assign dates that follow the predecessor to the (formerly) dateless task.

Sorting and Filtering

Dateless tasks are displayed and sorted based on the order in which they were initially created, though that order can be easily changed. To reorder tasks that don't have dates (even dateless tasks linked with dependencies), click the double arrow icon (⇅) icon that displays (on hover) to the right of the task's name. Once clicked, the Move Dateless Tasks overlay will display,

...where each dateless task at the same summary level in the project will be shown. In this overlay, drag and drop can be used to reorder the tasks. When ordering is finished, click outside of the overlay, on the "X" icon in the top right, or on the Done button to continue.

Filtering is supported for dateless tasks, with start or end date filters offering a "None" option to isolate to just the task(s) without dates, like in this example:

Templates

Templates can be edited so that the tasks don't contain dates, and new tasks without dates can also be added to an existing template using the methods describe above.

When selecting an existing template that contains dates to create a project or add tasks, there are options that relate to how dates should be used from that template. In the dropdown to the right of the template name list (depicted below), you can choose a start on or end on date, or no dates, the latter of which will add all of the tasks from the template into the project without dates.