Ability to lock a task to prevent further time being tracked against it

Hi,

I'd like to suggest a feature to enable PMs to lock a task to prevent further time from being tracked against it.

It would be even better if this was status dependent. For example, when a task is marked as complete, there should be an option to prevent any further time being tracked against it. There could also be a related automation that would use the status change as a trigger, then apply the timelog lock.

I'm surprised this isn't already a feature to be honest! I'd love to know if anyone else has this need.

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Comments

Rohan V

Hi @Phil Taylor 👋 Thank you for posting.

Here are a few workarounds that could potentially help with your use case:

Locking Tracked Time: You can lock tracked time to prevent entries from being edited or new entries from being added. Note that this can only be done at the project level, not at the task level. For more information, please refer to the guide on Locking and Unlocking Tracked Time.
Locking Project Dates: After reviewing your employees' time entries on a project, you can lock the project dates to prevent further editing of the time entries. This means the time logged for tasks within the project cannot be altered. To lock the dates, follow these steps:

Navigate to a folder, project, or space that includes the tasks with the necessary time entries.
Switch to Timelog view.
Click "Lock or unlock dates" in the upper-right corner of the view.
In the pop-up window, select the time frame you want to lock.
Click "Lock."

Automation Setup: Consider setting up an automation to move tasks to a private folder (or a folder shared only with specific users) once the task is marked as complete. This way, users will no longer have access to completed tasks and cannot track time on them. Here is an example of how to set up this automation.

Phil Taylor

Hi @Rohan V thanks for the suggestions, unfortunately none of them are suitable for our use case. My preference would be for a setting somewhere that says "prevent time logging on completed tasks". I appreciate the back-end changes for this would not be trivial but it would be a genuinely game-changing option for us.

To give you some background, the first step in our project process is the creation of the project proposal. The person in question uses the "create project proposal" task to log the time that they spend on the proposal. Once the proposal is ready, an approval is created and the task is set to the "completed" status. Any work to further update the proposal either to get it approved or post-approval is then logged in a "update project proposal" task. This allows us to report on the time it takes to initially create the proposal and then any subsequent time that is spent updating the proposal. The issue is that my users don't always follow this process and use the "create project proposal" task for to log all time on the proposal, whether that's pre- or post-approval.

Rohan V

Hi @Phil Taylor, thank you for taking the time to clearly explain your use case. I understand it now. I will forward this post to the relevant Product Team. If there are any updates regarding this feature suggestion, I'll keep you posted. 👍

Tuomo Suominen

FYI I just created the somewhat related post Timelog/Lock dates Automation.