Run a project with boards, timelines and burndowns

Projects don't fail for lack of a plan. They fail when the plan lives in one place, the work in another and the status in someone's head.

In Terra, every piece of work is a note — the draft, the decisions, the links — and the project plan is just a different way of looking at those notes. Group them by status and you have a kanban board. Lay them along their dates and you have a timeline. Count them and you have a progress chart. Change a card on the board and the note changes with it, because it is the note.

This guide builds a complete project suite for a real-sized example: launching a field guide in five weeks with two collaborators, Sam and Ines.

How it fits together

Four ideas carry the whole guide:

• Work items are notes. "Draft chapter 2" is a note in the project's folder. Its notes, links and checklists live inside it.
• Properties describe them. Each note carries a few properties — status, owner, start, due, effort — stored in the note's front matter. Every board, timeline and chart is built from these.
• A database collects them. A database is a live list of notes that match a rule, such as "everything in the projects/field-guide folder". It doesn't move or copy anything; notes join and leave it as they change.
• Views show them. A database can have many saved views, each with its own layout:

Step 1Give the project a home

Keep every piece of work for the project in one folder. It makes the database rule simple, and it means the project's files stay together on disk.

1. In the sidebar, under Folders, right-click projects (or any folder) and choose New subfolder. Name it field-guide and click Save.
2. Point at the new folder in the sidebar and click New note here. Name the note after a piece of work: Outline the field guide.
3. Repeat for each piece of work — Draft chapter 1, Design the cover, Copy edit, and so on. One note per thing someone can finish.

Step 2Create the project's database

1. In the sidebar, point at Databases and click + (New database).

2. Type a name: Field guide launch.

3. Click + (Add condition). Set the condition to Folder · starts with · projects/field-guide.

   

4. Click Save. The database opens as a table, with View preferences open beside it. It also appears in the sidebar under Databases, in the User group.

Prefer tags to folders? Use tags · contains · field-guide instead, and tag each work item. Either way, the rule lives on the Database tab of View preferences and you can change it later.

Step 3Add the properties every view runs on

Five properties are enough to run a serious project. Add them once and every view can use them.

1. In the table, click + at the right end of the header row (Add property), then New property.

2. Type the name — status — and click the type, Status.

   

3. Repeat for owner (Select), start and due (Date) and effort (Number).

4. Fill in the values right in the table: click a cell and pick or type. A new Status property comes with three options — Not started, In progress and Done — which is all most projects need.

Step 4Build the kanban board

A board shows each work item as a card in a column — one column per status — so the state of the project is visible at a glance.

1. At the top of the database, click the view menu (it shows the current view's name, All work here) and choose Add view. View preferences opens on the Layout tab.

   

2. Click the Board layout (the two-column icon), type Board in Name, and click Save view.

3. Close the panel. Terra groups the cards by your first Status property, so you get Not started, In progress and Done columns. Each column shows how many cards it holds out of the whole board — 3/10.

Now run the project from here:

• Move work forward: drag a card to another column. Terra writes the new status into the note.

• Open a card: click it to read or edit the note beside the board.

• Show more on cards: click Properties in the header and tick owner, due and effort; drag them to reorder.

• Group by something else: click Show boards as and pick another property — owner turns the board into a who's-doing-what view.

  

• Collapse to three columns: if your status property has many options, open View preferences › Group and set Group status by to Group. You get To do, In progress and Done.

• Hide a column: click the eye icon in its header. Bring it back from View preferences › Group › Hidden groups.

Step 5Lay out the timeline

The timeline answers "what happens when" and shows where work overlaps.

1. Open the view menu and choose Add view. Pick the Timeline layout, name it Timeline.

2. In View preferences, click the Dates tab. Set Start to start and End to due.

   

3. Click Save view. Each work item becomes a bar from its start date to its due date, with a line marking today.

Working with the timeline:

• Zoom: use the zoom menu at the top right — Day, Week, Month, Quarter or Year — and the arrows to move to the previous or next range. Scroll sideways to load more time.
• Reschedule: drag a bar left or right. Its start and due dates move together and are written to the note.
• Details: click a bar to see the item, open its note, or delete it.
• Swimlanes: group the view by status (in Group by) to get one lane per status.

What the timeline doesn't do yet

Bars can't be resized by dragging their ends — edit start or due in the table instead. There are no dependency arrows between bars. Swimlanes work for status, folder, type, tags and the created and updated dates. And the timeline is for notes: checkbox tasks with due dates appear on the Calendar instead (see Run your week with tasks).

Step 6Chart your progress

Charts turn the same properties into answers. Add a view with the Chart layout, then shape it on the Chart tab of View preferences:

• Chart — Bar, Horizontal bar, Line, Donut or Number (a single big figure).
• X axis — what to group by, such as status, owner or due. For dates, pick a Bucket: Day, Week, Month, Quarter or Year.
• Y axis — Count of items, or Sum, Average, Min or Max Of a number such as effort.

Three charts worth making for any project:

1. Where are we? — Chart Donut or Bar, X axis status, Y axis Count. Click a bar to list the items in it.

   

2. What's still due, and when? — Click Filters and add status is not in group Done. Then Chart Bar, X axis due with Bucket Week, Y axis Sum Of effort. You get the remaining work, week by week — a forward-looking cousin of the burndown.

3. Did we finish anything this week? — Filter status is in group Done, Chart Number, Compare Previous period, Date completed (see step 8), Window Last 7 days. The tile shows this week's count against last week's, with a small trend line.

Step 7Put it all on one dashboard

A dashboard is an ordinary note that holds live views of your databases — so the board, the chart and the key numbers sit on one page you can pin, link or open in a split.

1. Click New… in the toolbar and choose New from template….
2. Pick Dashboard — "A count, a chart, a table, and a board on one page."
3. The note has four blocks: a number, a chart, a table and a board. In each block's picker, choose Field guide launch.

Each block looks through the database's current view, so a filter, sort or grouping you change in one block changes that view everywhere it appears. Only the template blocks' layouts and their number and chart settings stay with the block. A change shows straight away in the block you made it in, and in the other blocks the next time you open the dashboard; Build a dashboard has the details. Rename the note Field guide — dashboard and pin it to the sidebar rail.

Step 8Chart a burndown

A burndown plots how much work is left on each day, so you can see whether you'll land on time.

Record when work finishes

1. Add a Date property called completed to the database (step 3).
2. Whenever you drag a card to Done, set its completed date. A table view sorted by status makes this quick.

Build the chart

1. Choose File › New Query.

2. Paste this into the editor, replacing projects/field-guide/ with your project's folder (keep the trailing slash):

   WITH items AS (
     SELECT
       date(n.created) AS opened,
       (SELECT f.value_text FROM v_frontmatter f
         WHERE f.note_id = n.id AND f.key = 'completed') AS closed
     FROM v_notes n
     WHERE instr(n.path, 'projects/field-guide/') = 1
   ),
   events AS (
     SELECT opened AS day, 1 AS change FROM items
     UNION ALL
     SELECT closed AS day, -1 AS change FROM items WHERE closed IS NOT NULL
   )
   SELECT day, sum(change) AS net
   FROM events
   GROUP BY day
   ORDER BY day
   

   Each item adds one on the day it was created and takes one away on the day it was completed. Added up over time, that's the number of items still open — your burndown, including any scope you add along the way.

3. Press ⌘Return, or click Run query in the floating tools. The results appear as a table.

4. Click View: Results in the floating tools and choose Chart.

5. Pick Line from the chart-type menu, then click Chart settings (the gear):

   • X axis › What to show — day
   • Y axis › What to show — net
   • Turn on Cumulative.

   

6. Click Save query and give it a name, so the SQL is one click away next time.

For an effort-weighted burndown, replace 1 and -1 with the item's effort (from v_frontmatter, key effort, column value_number). For a burn-up of finished work, keep only the completed rows and count them.

Features you might have missed

Checklists inside work items

Each work item can hold its own checklist (- [ ] Review). Show the Progress property on any view of the database to see a small completion ring per item — a lightweight way to track sub-steps without more notes.

A task board for the project's to-dos

If you write to-dos as checkboxes inside your notes, right-click Tasks in the sidebar and choose New task database. Name it Field guide tasks, then click Sources in its header and pick the projects/field-guide folder. You get a board of every checkbox in the project, in Open, In progress, Done and Cancelled columns. See Run your week with tasks.

Roll work up into milestones

On the timeline, parent items can show the progress of their children. Add a Thread property (in Add property, under Computed) that links a milestone note to its work items, then in View preferences › Dates set Children thread to it, Completion status to Status and Weight by Effort to effort. Parents gain a progress bar, weighted by effort. Children must be in the same database.

Status reports in one click

View preferences › Save as Markdown note freezes the current view into a dated note in your Inbox — a table you can paste into an update or keep as a record of where things stood.

An intake form

Add a view with the Form layout and share the screen in a meeting: each submission becomes a new note with the fields you chose.

Switch layouts instantly

Press ⇧⌘V to cycle the current view through every layout — a quick way to see which one tells the story best.

Troubleshooting

A card I added from the board disappeared

+ Add note puts new notes in your Inbox, which this database doesn't collect. Find the note in Inbox and move it into the project folder, or add work with New note here on the folder.

The timeline says "No timeline dates"

Open View preferences › Dates and set Start and End to your date properties. Until you do, Terra draws each note from the day it was created to the day it was last edited.

Milestone progress counts nothing as finished

Timeline progress treats an item as complete when its status is Done (or Cancelled). If you renamed your finished option — to Shipped, say — rename it back to Done in Tools › Property Manager….

Clicking Delete on a timeline bar removed my note

Delete in a timeline or calendar popover moves the note itself to the Trash. Restore it from Trash with Put Back.

The burndown chart lost its settings

Query chart settings aren't saved yet. Reopen the query, choose View: Results › Chart and set the axes and Cumulative again.

What's next

• Build a personal dashboard — more chart and stat-tile ideas.
• Run your week with tasks — checkbox tasks, due dates and the calendar.
• Find anything with search — find items across every project at once.