Tag Archives: Calendar

About syncing due dates with Google, Microsoft, and Apple calendars.

Views across all your boards

August 11, 2017Agile & Scrum, Kanban & Lean, KerikaCalendar, Kanban, Kerika, Scrum, Task Board, Trash, ViewsKerika

At long last, we have built Views — one of the most commonly requested features, and something that we had been obsessively designing and redesigning over years, trying to figure out the best way to handle this need.

We have done it now. Views has been built, and is automatically available across all your Task Boards and Scrum Boards, whether they are owned by you or shared with you.

We are starting off with four standard Views, and we will built more in the future, and add a way for you to build your own Views as well.

The Views we have built are:

What’s Assigned To Me

The most commonly asked for feature by people who are working on several projects — and, hence, several boards — at the same time. This is what it looks like:

Everything that’s currently assigned to, on all boards except for those that are in the Trash or Archive, are collected for you into a single View, where cards are organized as follows:

Not Scheduled
Overdue
Due Today
Due This Week (excluding what’s already included in Due Today)
Due Next Week
Due This Month (excluding what’s already included in Due Today and Due This Week)
Due This Quarter
Due Next Quarter

It is a comprehensive summary of everything you need to get done, and it will be invaluable for managers and anyone else who has to work on multiple projects at the same time.

If you select a card in a View, like this

You get quick access to key actions:

Move to Done
Move to Trash
View Board
Open

Open opens the card right there, inside the View itself. View Board, on the other hand, opens the card in the board in which it is located.

Both are useful, depending upon the card and what you want to do: in some cases you just need to update a particular card — e.g. reschedule it, add a comment or file — and opening the card in the View itself, which is very fast, is enough.

In other situations you might want to be sure you are understanding the context of the card, and it is better to see where it is on the board that contains it. This can be helpful for cards that you are not quite sure about.

What’s Due

This View will be particularly helpful to managers (Board Admins): it summarizes everything that’s due, on all boards where you are one of the Board Admins:

Cards are organized for you as follows:

Overdue
Due Today
Due This Week (excluding what’s already shown as Due Today)
Due Next Week
Due This Month
Due Next Month

For this View, as with the What’s Assigned to Me View, we try to be smart about not showing duplicate cards: if something is due today, for example, it will show up in the Due Today column, but not get duplicated in the Due This Week or Due This Month column.

This makes it easier for you to plan your schedule: you can see what needs to get right away, and what needs to get done later.

What Needs Attention

Again, a View that will be of particular interest to managers concerned with several ongoing boards:

Here, Kerika tries to show everything that needs a little extra attention: things that are

Overdue
Flagged as Critical
Flagged as Blocked
Flagged as Needs Review
Flagged as Needs Rework
Flagged as being On Hold

These items typically represent your risk profile across all your boards, and Kerika brings it all together in a single View.

What Got Done

Great for anyone who needs to produce a status report, or any manager who needs to monitor progress across many different projects:

Across all boards where you are a Board Admin, this View summarizes

What got done Today
What got done This Week (excluding items shown in This Week)
What got done Last Week
What got done This Month (again, excluding items shown for Today and This Week)
What got done Last Month
What got done This Quarter

Accessing Views:

All your Views can be accessed from a new tab called Views (naturally) on your Home Page:

On each View card, Kerika shows how many items are included in that View, and as of when. The Views are automatically refreshed when you open them, but in-between they are not updated because we do not expect the information shown to change on a second-by-second basis.

If you are worried that your View is out of date, you can update it by selecting it on your Home Page:

You can also update any View that you currently have open, by clicking on the Refresh button shown on the top-right of the View:

We will let you go crazy with these Views, for now. In the future we will add more (we already have some ideas on that front, but would love to hear from you as well!) and also add a Custom View capability.

Meanwhile, enjoy.

Including Overdue Tasks in Due This Week

July 18, 2017Agile & Scrum, Kanban & Lean, UsabilityCalendar, Kanban, Scrum, UsabilityKerika

In the recently added Highlights feature, we let you create your own custom highlights:

We fixed a problem where “This Week”, “Next Week”, etc. wasn’t including Overdue Tasks and cards, which could give users a somewhat misleading impression of what they needed to get done in a particular week or month.

After all, if something is already overdue, you will need to get that done this week along with anything that’s scheduled for this week!

Highlights, a better alternative to old-fashioned Filters

July 7, 2017Agile & Scrum, Kanban & Lean, UsabilityCalendar, Kanban, Scrum, Tags, UsabilityKerika

We have replaced the old Filters feature for our Task Boards and Scrum Boards with a new Highlights feature that we think is better in every way!

Click on the Flashlight icon on the top right corner of the Kerika app:

Highlights button

And you will see this menu of actions:

The default is No highlights. We have a couple of built-in highlights that we know you will find useful right away:

What’s assigned to me: very useful if you are working on a large board, or with a large team, and you focus on just what you need to get done.
What needs attention: this highlights all the cards on the board that we think need to pay attention too — items that are overdue, on hold, or flagged as needing review.

Here’s how the Highlights work:

A shadow effect helps spotlight all the cards that match the highlight, making them literally pop out of the screen!

If you are working on a board with a lot of columns, there’s always a chance that something that is being highlighted is currently out of view — if, for example, it is near the bottom of a long column.

Kerika takes care of that as well: if a card that matches your highlight choice is currently out of view, a green button appears at the top or bottom, as needed, of each column to indicate that there are cards out of view that match your highlight.

Matched cards are below the scroll — When matched cards are below the scroll

The green arrow acts as more than just an indication that you need to scroll: it is also a button that will scroll the column to show you the next card that you need to see.

(Pretty cool, huh?)

We will be adding more smart highlights in the coming weeks, but in the meantime you can also create your own custom highlights:

A Custom Highlight can include any combination of people assigned to cards, status, due dates and tags.

For the due dates, we have offered several smart options that are a lot easier to use than standard date pickers:

These ways of specifying due dates — like “Due Next Week” or “Next Month” — make it even easier to set up a custom highlight.

Enjoy.

Tasks within Cards

June 27, 2017Agile & Scrum, Kanban & Lean, UsabilityCalendar, Kanban, Scrum, Task BoardKerika

We have added a new feature to our Task Boards and Scrum Boards: you can now manage a list of tasks for each card on a board, like this:

Every card can have as many tasks as you like, organized in a simple, smart checklist.

Individual tasks can be assigned (to one person at a time) and scheduled, and Kerika is smart about rolling up these assignments and due dates to reflect them on the card as well:

As you mark off tasks as Done, they slide to the bottom of the list to make it easy to see what remains to be done.

Handling the different timezones in a distributed team

June 2, 2017Team Collaboration, UsabilityCalendar, Teams, UsabilityKerika

When you schedule cards on a Kerika Task Board or Scrum Board, we offer a simple way to pick a date:

We don’t support setting a specific time (e.g. 5:00PM) along with the time: these times are generally useless in most work settings and add unnecessary complexity to the user experience.

And, yet, it’s possible that Kerika reports a specific time for a due date, like in this example:

So, how did happen?

Well, Kerika took note of the fact that person making that time commitment (“I will get it done today”) was based in India.

And midnight in India is 11:30AM in Seattle — at least now, with Daylight Savings Time in effect.

So Kerika shows the Indian team member’s commitment of “I will get it done today” in terms that make sense to a colleague in Seattle:

11:47 AM Pacific Standard Time with Daylight Savings Time in force is 12:47PM Indian Standard Time; something that Kerika figures out automatically.

This simple, elegant way of handling timezones eliminates the frequent disagreements over “I meant my today, not your today…”

An example of the incredible attention to detail that Kerika brings to the needs of distributed teams.

New options for the 6AM Task Summary Email from Kerika

January 7, 2017Agile & Scrum, Technology, UsabilityCalendar, Kanban, Preferences, Scrum, Task Management, WorkflowKerika

Welcome to 2017! We have a big bunch of goodies lined up for release in the coming weeks and months, and we are going to start off with some nice improvements to the 6AM Task Summary email that you can (optionally) get from Kerika:

You now have two options: you can get all your overdue and due items sorted by date, or by board. Or both.

To turn this on, go to https://kerika.com/preferences, and check these boxes:

We have also improved the “group items by date”: instead of showing what’s due today and tomorrow, this email now includes What’s Due This Week and What’s Due Next Week.

“This Week” is adjusted automatically as the week progresses to keep track of what’s left for the current week, which always ends on Sunday.

Enjoy.

Calendar syncing

April 23, 2016Technology, UsabilityCalendar, PreferencesKerika

We quietly released a new feature a couple of weeks ago that we now want to announce to the world: you can have all your Kerika due dates appear automatically on your Mac, Outlook or Google Calendar!

All you have to do is go to https://kerika.com/preferences (or click on the Preferences link that shows up under your photo in the top-right of the Kerika app), and then click on the Start Syncing button on that page:

You can sync to your Apple/Mac calendar, your Microsoft Outlook calendar, or your Google Calendar.

Pick your preference, and Kerika will show you detailed instructions on how to start syncing.

Here, for example, are the instructions for syncing to your Apple/Mac calendar:

Apple Mac Calendar synching instructions — Apple Mac Calendar syncing instructions

And here are the instructions for syncing to your Microsoft Outlook calendar:

Microsoft Outlook synching instructions — Microsoft Outlook syncing instructions

And, finally, here are the instructions for syncing to your Google calendar:

Google Calendar synching instructions — Google Calendar syncing instructions

You will notice that we have deliberately obfuscated the actual calendar URL for this particular user, in all three images above.

That’s important: your calendar URL is unique and precious — don’t share it with anyone!

As your cards on your Kerika Task Boards and Scrum Boards get new due dates, Kerika will automatically feed these updates to your personal calendar: you don’t need to do anything.

Kerika due dates always appear as “all day” events.

Please note that it’s up to Apple/Microsoft/Google to determine how quickly these updates show up on your calendar.

On your Mac Calendar, for example, you can set the frequency with which these updates appear by doing a right-click with your mouse on the calendar and selecting Get Info:

And then setting the “Refresh time” for that particular calendar. (On Macs, the fastest that iCloud allows is every 5 minutes.)

Distinguishing between “Rescheduled to” and “Scheduled”

August 13, 2015UsabilityCalendar, UsabilityKerika

As we were “eating our own dogfood” with the new Planning Views feature, we increasingly found a need to distinguish between cards that had been scheduled for the first time, and those that were being rescheduled because they didn’t meet their original due dates.

This was probably a useful distinction for us to have made even before now, but the new Planning Views made it really important to tell which cards were slipping and which weren’t, and anyway, that’s the whole point of “dogfooding”: we use what we build, extensively, before we give it to our users, and that’s how we make great software 🙂

So here’s a simple enhancement that we think will help all teams: if a card on a Task Board or Scrum Board is rescheduled, i.e. given a new due date, the card will flag that like this:

As soon as you click on the card, the orange highlight gets turned off, and the due date is shown like any other date:

How to use Planning Views in Kerika

August 6, 2015Agile & Scrum, Kanban & Lean, Team Collaboration, Technology, UsabilityCalendar, Kanban, Scrum, Task Board, Teams, Usability, Views, WorkflowKerika

A new tutorial video, featuring our so-very-soon-to-be-released new user interface, that shows you how you can use Planning Views to manage your due dates, across all your Task Boards and Scrum Boards.

Showing Due Dates in local times

May 29, 2015Team Collaboration, UsabilityCalendar, Our Users, Scrum, Task Board, Teams, Usability, WorkflowKerika

Many of our users work in globally dispersed teams; our own team is spread out between Seattle and India.

With multiple timezones, particularly when they are widely spaced apart, commitments like “I will get this done today” become a little tricky to understand.

If someone in India says “I will get this done today”, is that India time or Seattle time? Well, that depends upon where you are, when you log into Kerika.

Kerika automatically factors in differences in timezones when showing due dates: someone who commits to getting something done “today” in India is actually committing to get it done by 11:30AM Pacific Standard Time, now that the US is in Daylight Savings Mode.

So, the due date is shown in a way that’s relevant to the user’s local time: our Seattle folks see an Indian’s commitment like this

These timezone differences automatically adjust for Daylight Savings Time: there’s nothing you need to do to see when a commitment is actually due.

Except, perhaps, notice that the item is now overdue, as indicated in red in the example above…

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