Labels and custom fields
Two small tools that make a busy board readable. Colored labels shared across every project, and your own fields on tasks and projects for the details TribeNest never asks about.
Every project has a name, a status and a due date because every project does. The details specific to your work, the client reference, the shoot location, the delivery format, are up to you. Labels and custom fields are how you add them.
Both live under Work in the dashboard menu, and both are set up once and used everywhere.
Labels
A label is a colored tag you put on tasks. Unlike almost everything else in Work, labels are shared across every project, so "Urgent" means the same thing wherever you see it.
Creating a label
- Go to Work then Labels.
- Type a Name in the form at the top.
- Pick a Color with the color swatch beside it.
- Click the create button.
The label appears in the list below, and immediately in the label picker on every task.
Each row in the list has a pencil to rename or recolor it, and a bin to delete it. Deleting a label takes it off every task that carried it.
Using labels
Open any task and find the Labels section. Pick from the dropdown to add one, and click a label chip to take it off again.
Labels then earn their keep in two places: they show on the face of a board card, in their color, so you can read a column at a glance, and they are one of the filters on the Tasks tab, so you can pull up everything urgent across a whole project in one click.
Keep the list short
A label list that runs to thirty entries is a list nobody reads. The ones that work are the handful you would actually filter by: a stage, a blocker, a priority you cannot express with the priority field.
Custom fields
A custom field adds a box of your own to either tasks or projects. It appears on every task or every project, and stays empty until someone fills it in.
Creating a custom field
- Go to Work then Custom fields.
- Under Applies to, choose Task or Project.
- Give it a Key. This is the short internal name. It has to start with a lowercase letter and contain only letters and numbers, like
clientReforshootLocation. - Give it a Label. This is what people actually read on the form, like "Client reference".
- Choose a Type.
- If the type is Select, add your Options, one per line.
- Click the create button.
The types
- Text for anything short and free-form.
- Number for quantities and counts.
- Date for a date picker.
- Select for a fixed set of choices you define.
- Checkbox for a plain yes or no.
- URL for a link.
Where they show up
A field that applies to tasks appears in the Custom fields section when you open a task, under the standard fields.
A field that applies to projects appears on the Identity card under a project's Settings, listed after the project's own details. A field nobody has filled in is left out of that list rather than shown empty, so the card stays readable.
Editing and deleting
Each field in the list has a pencil to change its label, and its options if it is a Select. The key does not change, so existing values keep working.
Deleting a field deletes its answers
Removing a custom field takes it, and every value anyone ever entered into it, off every task or project at once. There is no undo. If you only want to stop using a field going forward, it does no harm to leave it in place and empty.
Which one should you use?
A rough rule: if the answer is one of a few states that a whole team needs to see from across the room, it is a label. If the answer is a piece of information you look up when you open the thing, it is a custom field.
"Blocked" is a label. "Purchase order number" is a custom field.
Reports
One screen across every active project. How many tasks are done, how many hours have gone in, and how close each budget is to the line.
Knowledge base
Everything you write down, in a tree of pages you can nest, move, search and share exactly as narrowly as you want. Project files live here too, and nothing in them is public.