Plan Your Experiments

The Planner is where you map out what needs to happen, who's doing it, and when. Use the Board when you're driving work to completion and want a single glance at status. Use the Table when you need to bulk-review, sort, or filter every task at once.

Task Board

The Board organizes your tasks into columns by status. Drag a card from one column to the next as the work progresses. You can name columns whatever suits your workflow:

• "To Do → In Progress → Review → Done" for software-style task flows
• "Planned → Running → Analyzing → Complete" for experimental runs
• Anything else you want. Add, rename, reorder, recolor, and delete columns at will.

Tasks must be moved out before a column can be deleted.

Task Cards

Each card represents one task. Cards show the fields you've picked: assignees, deadline, priority, tags, subtask progress. Click a card to open the full task detail panel on the right.

The toolbar lets you choose which fields appear on cards, so the board stays readable as you scale up.

Table View

The Table shows every task in a spreadsheet-style grid with sortable, filterable columns. Use it when:

• You want to see every task's deadline in one place
• You're triaging a backlog and want to bulk-edit priority or assignees
• You need a CSV export for external reporting

Sort by any column (status, priority, deadline, assignee), and filter to narrow down. Selecting multiple rows lets you act on them in bulk.

Creating and Managing Tasks

Create a Task

Click the + button on a column, or use the quick-add at the bottom of any column on the Board. A new task needs only a title to be saved; everything else is optional.

The task fields you can set are:

• Title and description
• Status (which column the task lives in)
• Priority and difficulty
• Assignees, where more than one teammate can be assigned to the same task
• Tags to group related tasks across experiments
• Subtasks that nest under a parent task
• Dependencies so a task can be blocked on another
• Start date, end date, and deadline
• Estimated duration in minutes
• Scheduled time with a reminder

Open any task to set or change any of these in the detail panel.

Link a Protocol from Notes

Conspecta doesn't have a separate Procedure workspace. Instead, protocols live in Notes, and you embed a Notes page into a task to attach the protocol. When you do:

• The protocol is rendered inside the task detail panel
• The task pins a specific version of the protocol so future edits to the Notes page don't quietly mutate your record
• You can swap to a newer version of the protocol if and when you want it

This keeps the protocol single-sourced in Notes (with full version history and approval workflows) while the task tracks the run.

Discussion and History

The task detail panel includes:

• A comment thread for back-and-forth with assignees and reviewers
• Activity history showing every change to the task
• Links to other items in the project (samples, analyses, sequences, figures)

Filtering, Searching, Bulk Operations

Use the toolbar to filter tasks by status, assignee, tag, priority, or deadline. The search bar narrows by title or description. Select multiple cards or rows to move, delete, or update them in bulk.

Next Steps

• Write notes to author the protocols you link from tasks
• Track your samples to manage the specimens your tasks operate on
• Keyboard shortcuts for faster task creation and movement