Setting up your task board for service work

Most boards you'll copy were designed for software teams: Backlog, In Progress, Done. It looks close enough to agency work that people adopt it, then quietly work around it for a year.

The mismatch is specific. Software teams control when work is finished. Agencies don't — the client does. Any board that has no column for 'we've done our bit and are waiting' is lying about where your work actually sits.

Model the waiting

In service work, most delay isn't people being slow. It's work parked pending someone else. If that state is invisible, every stalled task looks like a performance problem, and your board becomes a source of unfair pressure instead of information.

Give waiting a column. Awaiting feedback, awaiting assets, awaiting approval — whichever is true for you. Suddenly a board full of stalled work reads correctly: not 'the team is behind' but 'we're blocked on four clients, and here's which'.

Fewer columns than you think

Every column is a decision someone has to make several times a day. Ten columns means ten judgement calls, which means nobody moves anything, which means the board is wrong by Wednesday. Start with four or five. Add one only when you catch yourself repeatedly unable to say where something is.

Sub-tasks for work that grew

Some tasks turn out to be five tasks. Handle that with sub-tasks rather than flattening it into a checklist buried in a description — the parent keeps the context and the client relationship, the sub-tasks carry the detail and can be assigned to different people.

The failure mode is the opposite: breaking everything down pre-emptively. If a sub-task will never be discussed on its own, it's a checklist item, not a task.

Custom properties: only what you'd sort by

Custom properties are how you make a generic board yours — deliverable type, priority, whatever your agency actually tracks. The discipline is asking whether you'd ever filter or sort by it. If not, it's decoration that someone has to maintain forever.

A property nobody fills in is worse than no property. It makes the board look complete while quietly being empty.

Let it settle

Your first board will be wrong, and that's fine. Run it for a month, then look at where people worked around it — the tasks that sat in the wrong column, the property everyone left blank. That's your redesign brief, and it's better than any template.