A task management app for teams where every job has an owner

Plenty of task tools let you put four people on a job. We chose not to, and people often ask about it, so here’s the reasoning. When a task has four assignees, each of them assumes one of the other three has it, and on Friday the customer with the cracked frame still hasn’t had a call.

One assignee means one person answers for it. Others can still help: they can comment, @mention each other, attach the photo of the frame, or watch the task so its updates land in their Inbox. But when you open the task there’s one name. If a job really belongs to two people, it’s usually two tasks, and splitting it forces the useful question of who does which half.

A personal to-do list only has to make sense to you. A task management app for teams has to make sense to the person who picks up your job when you’re off sick, so each Klusko task carries its dates and one of four priorities: Urgent, High, Medium or Low.

Agree what Urgent means before anyone uses it. In most shops it probably drifts until everything is Urgent and the word means nothing. Our rule: Urgent is today, and missing it costs money or a customer.

Subtasks hold the steps. A full service on a road bike might have subtasks for the drivetrain clean, cables, brake pads and the test ride, so whoever takes over after lunch can see where Farid got to. Tags and custom fields add the rest, like the ticket number. The tasks page lists every field.

My work is the page people open first. Its Today view shows what’s on your plate, so a mechanic doesn’t have to click through the workshop board and the stock board to find the three jobs that are hers.

Next to it is the Inbox, which puts mentions and new assignments in one list with a preview, along with updates on anything you watch. You clear it the way you’d clear email, except it’s only about work. And when you can’t remember where something lives, Cmd or Ctrl + K searches tasks, projects, people and messages at once. If jobs keep going missing in your group chat, we wrote about how tasks get lost in chat and what to do about it.

Some tasks never finish. The Saturday cash-up. The fortnightly order from your parts distributor. Set a task to repeat daily, weekly, every 2 weeks or monthly, and when you tick one off the next one appears, so it can’t drop off the list after a busy week.

Task templates cover the other kind of repeat: the job you do often but not on a schedule. Save the structure of a full service once, subtasks and all, and reuse it for every bike that comes in. Recurring tasks and templates are on the Team plan. The recurring work page goes further into routines and checklists.