Viewing Your Tasks On A Timeline / Gantt Chart
See your tasks as bars on a date axis, spot deadlines you will miss before they arrive, and link, drag, and schedule work precisely.
Overview
Timeline is a new way to look at your tasks and goals — as horizontal bars on a date axis, instead of a table. It's built for one question tables can't answer at a glance: where are we already going to miss a deadline?
Each bar shows when a task is scheduled to happen. Its due date is drawn separately, as its own marker. If a task's plan runs past its due date, Timeline flags it before the due date arrives — not after.
You can drag bars to reschedule work, link tasks that depend on one another, see which chain of work is driving your project's finish date, and set exact start/finish dates and progress from a single popover on any bar.
💡 The short version: open Timeline from the Views selector, drag bars to reschedule, click two tasks in a row to link them, and watch for the "will miss deadline" flag on anything whose plan has slipped past its due date.
Opening The Timeline View
Timeline is available everywhere your tasks are:
- In a project's Tasks tab, open the Views selector and choose Timeline.
- In All My Tasks (your cross-project task list), open the same Views selector and choose Timeline.
Tasks are grouped into lanes, either by the project that owns them or by assignee, and your goals appear as diamond milestones on their due dates.
Understanding A Bar: The Plan vs. The Deadline
This is the idea the whole view is built around, so it's worth getting straight:
- The bar itself is the plan — it runs from the task's scheduled start to its scheduled finish.
- The due date is a separate marker, drawn on the timeline at its own spot.
Most of the time these line up and you'd never notice the difference. But when work slips — the plan now finishes later than the due date — the bar and the marker separate, and the overlapping stretch is highlighted. That's your early warning: the task is going to miss its deadline, even though the deadline itself hasn't arrived yet.
If you haven't given a task an exact start or finish date, Timeline quietly falls back to sensible defaults (its due date, or the day it was created) so nothing looks broken. The moment you do set a schedule for it — by dragging it or entering dates in its popover — the bar switches to tracking that schedule instead of the due date. You can always undo this with Clear schedule dates (see below), which returns the bar to following its due date automatically.
Rescheduling By Dragging
Drag any part of a bar to reschedule the work:
- Drag the body of the bar to move the whole scheduled period, keeping its length the same.
- Drag the left edge to change only when it starts.
- Drag the right edge to change only when it's planned to finish.
Dragging never touches the due date — only the plan. If you need to move the actual deadline itself, that's a deliberate edit in the bar's popover (below), not something a drag can do by accident.
Setting Exact Dates And Progress
Click a bar to open its Schedule popover, which lets you set everything precisely instead of by eye:
Field | What it does |
Start | When the work is scheduled to begin |
Planned finish | When the work is scheduled to be done |
Due date (deadline) | The actual promise — separate from the plan |
Progress % | How complete the task is, shown as the bar's fill |
Clear schedule dates | Removes the plan and goes back to automatically following the due date |
The same popover also handles task hierarchy:
- Nest under… makes this task a sub-task of another one.
- Move to the top level removes it from a parent.
Sapience won't let you nest a task under something that would create a loop (a task can't end up as its own ancestor).
Linking Dependent Tasks
To connect two tasks — "B can't start until A is done," for example — click Link dependencies, then click one task and click a second task to link them. Click the same task again to cancel.
The link is drawn as a curved arrow between the two bars, and it's saved to the server — it's still there after you reload the page, it follows you to your other devices, and your teammates see it too.
Click an existing arrow to open its editor, where you can set:
- Type — how the two tasks relate: Finish → Start, Start → Start, Finish → Finish, or Start → Finish.
- Lag (days) — a gap between them. A negative number means the successor is allowed to start early (a "lead" instead of a lag).
If a link's rule is being broken — the schedule doesn't actually respect the dependency you set up — the arrow shows how many days it's off by.
Critical Path And Driving Chain
Toggle Critical path to highlight the tasks with no slack left before a deadline gets missed — the exact chain of work you need to protect if you want to hit your dates.
If nothing in view has a deadline set yet, there's nothing to run out of slack against, so Timeline switches automatically to Driving chain instead: the longest connected sequence of linked tasks, by calendar span. It's still useful — it just isn't a promise about a deadline, so it's labeled differently on purpose.
The Will-Miss-Deadline Warning
Timeline also runs a separate check across everything in view: any task whose plan now finishes after its due date gets flagged as will miss deadline — a warning that appears before the due date itself has passed. Use the will-miss filter to show only those tasks, or turn it off to see everything again.
This is different from a task simply being overdue (its due date has already passed). Will-miss is a prediction from the plan; overdue is a fact about the calendar. Timeline shows both.
Zooming And Navigating
- Switch between Day, Week, and Month zoom to see more or less detail.
- Click Jump to today to re-centre the view on the current date.
- Click the arrow beside a task with sub-tasks to expand or collapse its children; the same works for a whole project or assignee group.
What Happens Behind The Scenes
- Sapience reads each task's scheduled start and finish (if you've set them), its due date, its progress, and any dependency links, and lays them out on the date axis.
- A task you haven't scheduled draws using sensible fallbacks — its due date, or its creation date — so nothing you haven't touched changes appearance.
- The moment you drag a bar or set dates in its popover, Sapience writes both the start and finish dates together, which is what makes the bar start tracking your plan instead of the due date.
- Dependency links are saved on the task that depends on the other one, so they're real data on the server — not just a drawing in your browser.
- Critical path (or driving chain) and the will-miss warning are recalculated live from your current dates and links every time something changes.
Things Worth Knowing
- A drag can never move a due date. It only ever moves the plan. Moving the actual deadline is always a deliberate action in the popover.
- Sub-tasks and their parent are scheduled independently. Timeline doesn't yet roll a parent's dates up from its children.
- Available everywhere your tasks are — a project's Tasks tab and All My Tasks — with no setting to turn on. It's simply part of the Views selector.
Summary
Timeline shows your tasks as bars on a date axis, with the plan and the deadline drawn as two distinct things instead of one. Drag to reschedule, link tasks that depend on each other, set exact dates and progress from a bar's popover, and let Critical Path (or Driving Chain, when there's no deadline yet) show you which chain of work matters most — while the will-miss warning tells you, ahead of time, exactly where the plan and the promise have come apart.