Who says you can only set goals and start anew at the beginning of the year? Today, at the beginning of Q2 2020, we’re starting something new.
Our “something new” will be a series of Toggl Plan updates, both about the product, and life here in general. We want to be more transparent with showcasing what we’ve done and also help you get more out of Toggl Plan.
If you’ve missed any Toggl Plan updates this year, now is the time to catch up. Keep reading!
The Product
In the first quarter, Toggl Plan witnessed some of its biggest feature launches in years. After many months of preparations and hard work, we were all super excited to finally publish Boards Beta. But that’s not all. Here’s a chronological list of the biggest news of Q1.
Multi-Assign
Technically this feature was released 4 days before 2020 kicked off, but hey, we still believe it deserves some extra love and attention.
Multi-assign makes it easier to manage tasks that several people are working on at once. On the Team Timeline, multi-assigned tasks are automatically duplicated and displayed in every assignee’s timeline. However, the clean look of the Project Timeline is still there with just one task for all the assignees. Multi-assign is a premium feature.
Favorites
Since we started working on the sidebar last year, we’ve been aiming to make Toggl Plan as easy as possible to navigate. While the sidebar was a huge step forward, it can still get messy when you have many people in your team, working on tens of projects. For this, we’ve launched favorites – a way to pin the views you use most to the top of the sidebar. Favorites is a premium feature.
Boards for Projects Beta
This is one of the biggest new features we’ve shipped in a long time! While we love the colorful and simple appearance of our timelines, adding boards offers extra flexibility, and options for managing your work. It’s really the best of both worlds with our seamless integration between timelines and boards.
Boards launched in February, and since then we’ve continued working on smaller steps and improvements to get it out of Beta. For example, we’ve added bulk-status change for boards and are currently working on live sync.
Tasks Marked as Done on Timeline
With boards launch, we initially made some changes to how tasks marked as Done would appear on the timeline. However, we quickly heard from our users that not all were thrilled with the update. We appreciate everyone’s candid feedback. Some users were happy with the change, while others missed the fading of completed tasks.
Thanks to the insights received, we believe we’ve reached a solution that finally serves people on both sides. Now, everyone can choose in Settings if they want Done tasks to appear faded on the timeline or not.
Following, Comments and Mentions on Tasks
It’s always been our goal that Toggl Plan’s simple visual overviews improve transparency within teams, and reduce unnecessary communication. That being said, collaboration is often needed on specific tasks and projects. Sometimes you just need to add your two cents to a task in an ongoing project. Wouldn’t it be great if you could do it right then and there, inside the task in Toggl Plan?
We thought so, and decided to introduce comments – a simple way to add your input to any task. But that’s not all. There’s also mentions – a way to notify any teammate about the comment. Notifications about mentions are delivered via email, as are any changes to tasks you follow. Yes, you heard that right – you can also follow tasks of interest and receive revamped notification emails to never miss an update.
Dark Mode Beta
This fun feature actually came out of a little something we call Go Loco week – a designated time for everyone to work on something they might not usually have time for but that’s close to their hearts.
You can turn dark mode on or off at any time, either in your Profile Settings, or by using the keyboard shortcut “d”. You’re welcome!
Tags
Technically tags went live during the first few days of Q2. However, since we worked hard on it in Q1, it deserves a mention here.
People like to organize their work differently and tags make it easier to manage and sort tasks on Plan Boards and Timelines. You can create as many tags as you need within a Plan as well as assign as many tags as necessary to a task.
Tags’ creation and assignment takes place within a task popup. Once you’ve added tags to tasks, you can filter which tasks are visible on your plan view based on tags.
Other
As well as everything mentioned so far, we’ve also been constantly working on performance improvements, bug fixes, and smaller updates. Some examples of the latter include deleting segments with tasks, horizontal scroll (shift + scroll) fix on timeline, new keyboard shortcuts and improvements to quick search.
Toggl Plan, the Company
Apart from product features, another huge change took place in February – we rebranded as Toggl Plan. We really love our new look and hope you do too. If you’re interested in learning more about the background, you can find it here. If you’re working on a rebrand yourself, why not take a look at a little checklist of things to consider here.
Finally, we would like to emphasize that we have always supported non-profits, and we will continue to do so. If you’re using Toggl Plan for a non-profit, please reach out to us here. Other than that, we also have a free plan for small teams of up to 5 users.
Final Words
It is fair to say the first quarter has been full of chaos. Like the whole world, we’re doing our best and taking everything one step at a time.
We launched a few massive projects we had been working on for a while in the first quarter, as well as made some mistakes and quickly learned from them. We appreciate everyone who has provided us with valuable insights and feedback – we couldn’t do it without you. Thank you and stay safe!
Kati Kuustik is a marketing and analytics specialist at Toggl Plan, where she helps the product and marketing teams better understand user behavior in order to translate that into valuable product updates and effective campaigns.
