The Timeline
Swimlanes by schedule health, and exactly how a task lands in each one.
The Timeline answers *how is this going?* Time runs across the top, lanes run down the left, and every task sits in the lane that says how its schedule is holding up. There is no name column — a bar carries its own title, starting inside the bar and running out of it, so a short task's title is never cut off.
The four lanes
| Lane | Means |
|---|---|
| Ahead of Schedule | Meaningfully further along than the time spent would suggest — or finished. |
| In Progress | On pace, or nothing to pace it against yet. |
| Delayed | Its deadline has passed, or its owner told us it has already slipped. |
| At Risk | Behind pace, blocked, flagged in a meeting, or reported at risk. |
Nothing here reads your column names. Two tasks sitting in the same "In progress" column routinely land in different lanes, because the lane is about schedule health, not workflow stage.
How a lane is decided
Noots compares how much of the task's checklist is done against how much of its runway has been spent. The runway ends at the nearest promise the task has made — first match wins:
- 1The task's next incomplete milestone.
- 2The task's own due date.
- 3The Noot's next milestone.
- 4The Noot's target date.
If the deadline is a milestone with its own checklist, that milestone's checklist is what gets measured. Then, highest wins:
| Signal | Result |
|---|---|
| You dragged the bar into a lane | It stays pinned there until you clear the pin. |
| The task is done | Ahead of Schedule. |
| The deadline has passed | Delayed — a fact outranks an opinion. |
| A fresh check-in answer | Whatever the owner said (see Check-ins). |
| Blocked, or flagged in a meeting | At Risk. |
| More than 15 points behind pace | At Risk — and it offers to ask the owner. |
| More than 10 points ahead of pace | Ahead of Schedule. |
| Anything else | In Progress. |
Nothing is graded until 20% of its runway has been spent, so a three-month task doesn't look doomed on day one. Every bar explains itself — hover it and you get the sentence, the deadline it's measured against and the checklist count.
It sits in In Progress and says so: "No checklist to pace against — add one and this task will track itself against its next milestone." The only other signal available would be the board column, which is exactly what this design rules out.
Working in the Timeline
- Drag a bar to reschedule it; drag its right edge to change the due date.
- Drag it into another lane to pin it there by hand.
- Focus a bar and press ← / → to nudge a day, Shift for a week.
- Zoom between Days, Weeks, Months, Quarters and Years — or hold Shift and scroll over the chart, which keeps the day under your pointer fixed. The chart opens on the work rather than on empty history.
- Group by Team, Assignee, Status, Priority, Milestone or nothing at all. Each group gets its own milestone row.
- Bars fill with checklist completion, so progress is legible without opening anything.
- Toolbar: grouping, Completed to show finished work, and Lanes to rename, recolour, add or remove swimlanes.
Zoom, grouping, which fields are shown and the completed toggle are saved per person per project — so they survive a page refresh and every save you make, and your choices never change what a teammate sees.
Renaming a default lane keeps its automatic behaviour — call "At Risk" whatever your team calls it and placement still works. Lanes you add yourself are filled by hand only.