Basics
At Sirap.io, we recognize that teams operate in vastly different ways, serving diverse purposes and across various industries and domains. A startup software team, for instance, operates differently from a care team at an elderly care center or a parents’ group at a kindergarten.
To deal with this diversity, we knowingly avoid prescribing specific processes for teams. Instead, we provide tools to facilitate effective work management. These tools enable teams to collect, organize, visualize, and control their tasks, ensuring clarity on team responsibilities, maintaining transparency, and fostering continuous updates.
Sirap.io provides a few general mechanics that are useful for all teams to adopt, regardless of their composition, work processes, and practices.
Two such concepts are 'Items' and 'Workspaces'. An item is a single, distinct piece of work, while a workspace is a container for items.
Items
An item, simply put, represents a piece of work that you and your team have decided you should complete. Some examples are: 'Book office offsite venue', 'Collect data for Q2 earnings call', and 'Paint fence'.
An item can anything — a task, a problem to solve, a box to tick, or an idea to develop.
This is what items look like in Sirap.io:
Groups
If you have multiple items that belong together and/or depend on each other, you can drag-and-drop these on top of other items. This creates what in Sirap.io is called a 'Group'.
Groups create visual hierarchies among items, typically within a single workspace (but groups can also consist of items from multiple workspaces).
Click the '>' icon in front of the status symbol to expand and contract the group, which is handy if you don't want to have all of a group's items visible all the time.
Inside a group, you can move items around by dragging and dropping them on a new parent item.
Placing an item on a group's primary parent moves it out of that group.
Workspaces
Every item belongs to a Workspace, which is Sirap.io's highest-level way of organizing items that belong together. Examples of workspaces are ToDos this week, and Q2 earnings report, and Thanksgiving dinner 🍗.
Drag and drop items onto another workspace to move them between workspaces.
Make sure you drop the item on the workspace area itself, and not on any items in the new workspace. If you drop it on an item in the target workspace, they will form a group and the original item's workspace will remain unchanged.
Item properties
Items have 'Properties' that allow you to track what happens to them over time. These include:
Status: The current state of the item (e.g., 'Open', 'Paused', 'Closed').
Priority: The urgency or importance of the item (e.g., 'Critical', 'Normal', 'Low').
Assignee: The user who's responsible for resolving the item.
Workspace: The project or work area where the item belongs.
Start/Due Date: The dates when work began/will begin and when resolution is expected/needed.
Tags: Keywords that help categorize the item.
Files: Attachments related to the item.
Description: A detailed explanation of the item.
Comments: A record of the team's communication and updates about the item.
ID: each item also has a unique ID that helps the team separate it from other items.
In the above example:
'Paint fence' is the item's title.
'TAT-3' is its unique ID.
The item has the status 'Open'.
Because its priority is unset, it defaults to 'Normal'.
Its project is indicated by the '🛠️' icon and the project color.
Someone assigned team member 'Daniel' to the item.
The item has no start date, due date, tags, files, or description associated with it.
Assignee
The ‘Assignee’ is the team member the team has selected responsible for the work described by an item.
You can assign yourself to any item, and you can assign any other team member to any item. Logically, any other team member can also assign you to any item.
It is not uncommon for the assignee to change over the lifecycle of an item.
Assigning someone to an item is simple. Click on the 'Assign' button and select the team member to assign:
You can also change the assignee as well as set some other common properties directly from the item list. Right-click on an item to bring up the context menu, and select the action you want to perform.
Status
Once the item's work is complete, we change its status property to 'Closed'. This signifies to your team that this work is done.
Similarly, Sirap.io's six statuses each signal to the team what the position is for the work it represents.
Draft signals that this item is being worked on and can generally be ignored for the time being.
Open is the default status that signals that the item is being active and worked on.
Paused signals that work on the item has been paused for some reason.
Discuss suggests to the team that the work represented by the item is in such a state that a discussion is necessary to advance it.
Backlog signals that the work will be carried out at a later stage.
Closed indicates that the outlined work is complete and no longer active.
Priority
An item’s priority indicates the urgency with which the team should approach it.
Here are the priority levels:
Blocker: Highest priority.
Critical: Very high priority.
High priority: Items with high priority are flagged as more important to resolve than typical items.
Normal priority: This represents items with typical priority, neither high nor low (this is the default priority).
Low priority: Less important compared to items with normal priority or higher.
Lowest priority: This represents an item with very low priority.
Flagged: A flagged item can be used by teams to signify the importance of an item over others and visually mark it without necessarily implying high or low priority. In practice, teams typically decide internally what the flagged property means to them.
Those are the fundamental concepts you need to know about. Now, you’re all set to embark on your journey!
Basics
At Sirap.io, we recognize that teams operate in vastly different ways, serving diverse purposes and across various industries and domains. A startup software team, for instance, operates differently from a care team at an elderly care center or a parents’ group at a kindergarten.
To deal with this diversity, we knowingly avoid prescribing specific processes for teams. Instead, we provide tools to facilitate effective work management. These tools enable teams to collect, organize, visualize, and control their tasks, ensuring clarity on team responsibilities, maintaining transparency, and fostering continuous updates.
Sirap.io provides a few general mechanics that are useful for all teams to adopt, regardless of their composition, work processes, and practices.
Two such concepts are 'Items' and 'Workspaces'. An item is a single, distinct piece of work, while a workspace is a container for items.
Items
An item, simply put, represents a piece of work that you and your team have decided you should complete. Some examples are: 'Book office offsite venue', 'Collect data for Q2 earnings call', and 'Paint fence'.
An item can anything — a task, a problem to solve, a box to tick, or an idea to develop.
This is what items look like in Sirap.io:
Groups
If you have multiple items that belong together and/or depend on each other, you can drag-and-drop these on top of other items. This creates what in Sirap.io is called a 'Group'.
Groups create visual hierarchies among items, typically within a single workspace (but groups can also consist of items from multiple workspaces).
Click the '>' icon in front of the status symbol to expand and contract the group, which is handy if you don't want to have all of a group's items visible all the time.
Inside a group, you can move items around by dragging and dropping them on a new parent item.
Placing an item on a group's primary parent moves it out of that group.
Workspaces
Every item belongs to a Workspace, which is Sirap.io's highest-level way of organizing items that belong together. Examples of workspaces are ToDos this week, and Q2 earnings report, and Thanksgiving dinner 🍗.
Drag and drop items onto another workspace to move them between workspaces.
Make sure you drop the item on the workspace area itself, and not on any items in the new workspace. If you drop it on an item in the target workspace, they will form a group and the original item's workspace will remain unchanged.
Item properties
Items have 'Properties' that allow you to track what happens to them over time. These include:
Status: The current state of the item (e.g., 'Open', 'Paused', 'Closed').
Priority: The urgency or importance of the item (e.g., 'Critical', 'Normal', 'Low').
Assignee: The user who's responsible for resolving the item.
Workspace: The project or work area where the item belongs.
Start/Due Date: The dates when work began/will begin and when resolution is expected/needed.
Tags: Keywords that help categorize the item.
Files: Attachments related to the item.
Description: A detailed explanation of the item.
Comments: A record of the team's communication and updates about the item.
ID: each item also has a unique ID that helps the team separate it from other items.
In the above example:
'Paint fence' is the item's title.
'TAT-3' is its unique ID.
The item has the status 'Open'.
Because its priority is unset, it defaults to 'Normal'.
Its project is indicated by the '🛠️' icon and the project color.
Someone assigned team member 'Daniel' to the item.
The item has no start date, due date, tags, files, or description associated with it.
Assignee
The ‘Assignee’ is the team member the team has selected responsible for the work described by an item.
You can assign yourself to any item, and you can assign any other team member to any item. Logically, any other team member can also assign you to any item.
It is not uncommon for the assignee to change over the lifecycle of an item.
Assigning someone to an item is simple. Click on the 'Assign' button and select the team member to assign:
You can also change the assignee as well as set some other common properties directly from the item list. Right-click on an item to bring up the context menu, and select the action you want to perform.
Status
Once the item's work is complete, we change its status property to 'Closed'. This signifies to your team that this work is done.
Similarly, Sirap.io's six statuses each signal to the team what the position is for the work it represents.
Draft signals that this item is being worked on and can generally be ignored for the time being.
Open is the default status that signals that the item is being active and worked on.
Paused signals that work on the item has been paused for some reason.
Discuss suggests to the team that the work represented by the item is in such a state that a discussion is necessary to advance it.
Backlog signals that the work will be carried out at a later stage.
Closed indicates that the outlined work is complete and no longer active.
Priority
An item’s priority indicates the urgency with which the team should approach it.
Here are the priority levels:
Blocker: Highest priority.
Critical: Very high priority.
High priority: Items with high priority are flagged as more important to resolve than typical items.
Normal priority: This represents items with typical priority, neither high nor low (this is the default priority).
Low priority: Less important compared to items with normal priority or higher.
Lowest priority: This represents an item with very low priority.
Flagged: A flagged item can be used by teams to signify the importance of an item over others and visually mark it without necessarily implying high or low priority. In practice, teams typically decide internally what the flagged property means to them.
Those are the fundamental concepts you need to know about. Now, you’re all set to embark on your journey!