Worksection is a unified workspace that is designed to organize your business and make communication easier. If your project has too many tasks and you don’t know how to systematize the chaos, Worksection has a solution: Status and Labels.
About Worksection Statuses and Labels
The Status refers to a specific stage of your business process.
Labels are a set of features of a particular task, of which there can be many.
Even though it is clearly defined, people often wonder: “What’s the difference between statuses and labels?”
Difference between Statuses and Labels
Consider the difference between Statuses and Labels using the case of ordinary sandwiches. Each sandwich corresponds to a separate task in the system.
What can a sandwich be? — Statuses
The sandwich can be: under the cooking or tasting stage; ready; spoiled.
That means a sandwich cannot be at the tasting and spoiled stages at the same time. Therefore, you can select only one task status according to the stage of the workflow.
What else can a sandwich be? — Tags
However, like sandwiches, tasks can be more complex and a single status is not enough to describe them. That’s why, in Worksection, you can also add Labels to a task.
So, the sandwich may also differ:
- By type of bread: white, brown, whole wheat, fermented.
- By type of meat: chicken, turkey, tuna, salami or vega.
- By purpose: for a snack on the go, for lunch, for breakfast.
Making the sandwich — Conclusion
Therefore, the Status is the state of the task, and the Labels are a set of its features.
Standard statuses in Worksection
By default, your Worksection account has been set:
- 2 standard workflows (status sets)
- 4 standard sets of labels
Important Account administrators can create custom statuses and labels, taking into account the specifics of projects and tasks.
Statuses and Labels for different types of business
Let’s also take a look at how Statuses and Labels can be used by different types of businesses, using examples: Digital agency, IT company, Design agency.
Digital agency
IT company
Design agency
How to create custom statuses and labels
You can create custom statuses and labels in the “Statuses and labels” section. To access the “Status and labels” section, click on your avatar in the upper right corner, and then select “Account”.
In the opened window, select “Status and tags”:
Now you can work with statuses and labels separately.
How to create your own workflow and statuses for it
Statuses are combined into groups (workflows). You can create custom workflows within your account that meet the specifics of your company and separate departments.
Step 1. Click the “Task statuses” tab.
Step 2. Press “Add workflow” under the list of existing workflows.
Name the new workflow and click OK. Then add statuses for the created workflow. Choose a unique color for each status.
How to create labels
In the “Task labels” section, click “Add a set of labels”:
Specify a name for the label set and check the box next to “Only visible to your team” if you want to share this set with the entire team. Click OK.
Now we have a new set of tags, but it’s still empty. Next, we need to add our labels to the “Posting articles” set. Press “Add label” to create a new label.
In our example of “Posting articles”, the labels will indicate the places where the material is posted: social networks, your own website, blog, external sites.
Like in the case of statuses, when you create labels, you choose your unique color for each one.
Additional label settings
You can also select the projects in which you want to make the label set available to use. As with statuses, click on the portfolio icon in the label set and check the boxes next to the names of the projects for which you want to make the set available.
You can also make additional settings for all workflows by choosing both, none, or one of them:
- Set the first status when creating tasks
- Clear all statuses on closing
To make a selection, place a check mark next to the option you want and click Save.
How to add statuses and labels to a project
When creating a new project, you have the opportunity to choose which statuses and labels will be used for tasks within this project.
You can create a new project by clicking the “+” in the upper right corner. In our example, the project “Writing blog articles” has 2 sets of labels and 1 workflow “General statuses” with a unique set of statuses.
In order to view the workflow statuses or change the workflow of the “Writing blog posts” project, click “1. General statuses / Label set: 2”.
Now all tasks created within the “Blog Post Writing” project will have a “Content Journal” workflow with the option to select one of the process statuses for each stage.
For example:
As part of the “Blog post writing” project, we have a new task to write an article “Email marketing effectiveness”. There is a set of statuses for the task, where we have to choose only one status.
Now the task is at the writing stage, so select the “Writing” status.
How to display all project tasks as Kanban
In order to view all the tasks of a Kanban project, you need to open the project and select “Tasks” in the top menu. Next, click on the three horizontal blue lines and select “Kanban”:
The column on the left side contains a general list of project tasks. If you selected a status for a task when creating or editing it, it will appear in the column with the appropriate status on Kanban.
For example: for the task “Write an article about influencer marketing”, the status was set to “Review”. Accordingly, on Kanban, the task is displayed in the column with the status “Review”.
You can also change the status for a task by dragging it to the column with the desired status. For example: the article “Write an article about influencer marketing” has already been reviewed and now needs to be edited. We need to drag the article from the Review column to the adjacent Edit column.
To drag a task, put a bird in front of its name, left-click the task, and drag it to the column with the “Editing” status.
How to filter tasks by labels and statuses
To filter tasks with the desired status, in the general list of statuses, click Labels in the top menu bar:
Then select the label you want to filter. In our example, we want to filter out tasks labeled “Review”. Click “Review” and we see that we have one article with this status:
How to use labels to evaluate performance
To evaluate the result of work with the help of labels (for example, if you are the author of a task), you need to create a set of labels with the evaluation characteristics you need in the Status and Labels section.
Let’s take a look at an example:
We created a set of labels called “Performance” and added our own labels to the set: “Excellent!”, “Poor”, “Super”.
Using the portfolio image, select the projects for which you want to make this set of labels available. Click “Apply”.
Now let’s go back to our project “Writing blog articles”, open one of the tasks and select a label to evaluate the result of the work.
Choose “Done well” and click “OK”. The new label will be displayed in the line next to the status and other labels (if you have selected them before).
Why labels are useful if you track time for tasks
If the time for a task has expired, it is important to understand the reason for the extension. To do this, we recommend using labels. In our example, we have created a set of labels that indicate the reason for the late completion of the task:
You can also select projects using the portfolio icon. The created set of labels will be available for tasks within the selected projects.
A quick guide to working with statuses and labels
You can set statuses and labels for each task and subtask separately.
Each Worksection account comes with 2 standard workflows with statuses and 4 sets of labels. The rest you create yourself, taking into account the needs of the company and the specifics of workflows.
Status = the status of a task or the stage at which it is currently located. Tasks are displayed on the Kanban board by their statuses.
The statuses available for a task will always be displayed in the task settings above the set of labels. You can create your own statuses and labels, or delete unnecessary ones, in the Statuses and labels section. Statuses are displayed in rectangles, while labels are displayed in a rounded shape.
Read more useful information about convenient and efficient work with Worksection in our blog.