New To-Do List collaborative tool

[Lena E]

Today, we are starting to test out a new collaborative tool, To-do lists, with freelancers and clients. To-do lists can serve as a collaborative space to organize your contract’s work. Clients and freelancers will be able to create to-dos, assign an owner, add a short note, and set a due date.

We hope the due dates and notes in this tool will be helpful when managing projects and deadlines. You can toggle to view the full list or only tasks assigned to you, so this tool could also function as a way to organize your own tasks for a contract in an easy to access spot.

Use the tool however you’d like. It’s completely optional and the deadlines are not monitored by Upwork and do not replace your contract terms agreed upon when starting the contract. You can access the to-do list from your contract workroom. We have released this to some customers today and will expand to more very soon.

Tell us how you like it and what improvements you'd suggest with the feedback.

[Jody P]

Hi Lena,

Thank you for that update and new feature - it looks very promising.

I plan to start testing it out today, so I will gladly let you know how it goes.

Best regards,

Jody PM

[Timothy S]

Thank you, Lena.

At the time of this message, I see this as an option for certain clients when I log into Upwork via my browser only.

Is this something we can expect to see within the desktop app, as well?

It also would be nice to have the ability to thread comments related to a "to-do" with that "to-do". That way, clients and freelancers won't have to scroll through messages linearlly to find where that comment was from that particular "to-do" item from last month, or several months ago.

Adding a comment to a "to-do" item could post to both the main chat and on the "to-do" item to enable a conversation on the "to-do" that is also tracked in the main thread (similar to threads in other communication tools).

Tim

[Douglas Michael M]

I can see this being useful for documenting "deadlines" for clients on jobs that require a certain amount of back-and-forth.

[Jody P]

Hi Douglas,

Yes, that could be useful. I'm currently finding it to be handy with virutal assistants. It's great to keep everyone on the same platform without having to branch off into Trello or some other service that's overkill for just plain old to-do's on Upwork. And because it's part of both the client's and the freelancer's UI, this is easily accomplished.

As a web developer, I use to-do lists obsessively, even outside of things like Github; and I will tell you that the most simple to-do lists are always the best in my opinion: just a checkbox, a description, and a due date. Anything outside of that creeps into the wild and often convoluted world of project management.

This one is baked-in and simple. So far, like you, I see its usefulness.

Jody

ETA: typo

[Mekail R]

Thank you for that update.