5 powerful ways to use filters in Teamwork Projects

Did you know that a typical knowledge worker spends 36% of their day looking for, and consolidating, information across systems? That’s almost 3 hours of every single workday wasted. Eek! We think those 3 hours could be spent on something more productive. That’s why Filters in Teamwork Projects allow you to locate the exact piece of information you need in seconds, so you can save your time and energy for the stuff that really matters. Whether you’re searching for a comment mentioning a particular keyword, time logged by an individual team member, or a group of tasks with a particular tag or due date — Filters are here to help. The filtering option within each area of your site can be accessed by selecting the filter icon to the right of the screen:

Selecting this will open the right pane which holds the various filtering options. You can collapse or expand the filter panel whenever you need to. While there are multiple ways to use filters in Teamwork Projects, we’ve put together a list of some popular use cases to help make life easier for you and your team.

1. Filter Tasks by Assignee and Due Date

The long awaited vacation you’ve been planning for months has finally arrived, you’re just about to leave the office and you can practically smell the ocean air. Except there’s just one problem — you need to locate all of your tasks due over the next week and then reassign them to one of your teammates. With Filters in Teamwork Projects, finding tasks that match particular criteria among hundreds of others in multiple projects is possible in just a few clicks. Here’s how:

1. Go to the Everything area of your Teamwork Projects site.

2. Select Active Tasks, and click on the Filters icon on the right of your screen.

3. Enter your name in the Assigned To section.

4. Input the date range that you would like to filter your tasks by (you can choose from some preset options or select Custom date range) to see all your tasks within a specified date range.

5. To bulk edit these tasks and assign to another user, select the menu button to the top right (three dots) and the Bulk Edit option.

   

6. From here you can select an action to perform on the tasks. In this example, we will Modify the tasks.

7. After you have selected all the tasks you want to edit (if you want to quickly select everything, choose All at the bottom right of the modal), move on to the next step and select the user you would like to reassign the tasks to.

8. Hit Update and you’re done!

2. Filter Tasks by Tag

Whether you’re waiting on a blog post to be peer-reviewed, feedback from a client on a website mockup, or budget approval from management for a new contractor agreement, you’ll probably need input from others at some stage during your working week. But you can’t always rely on others to be as organized or productive as you are, and may need to …ahem… gently remind them that you’re waiting on their input before you can move forward. Identifying all of your tasks that are “waiting for approval” is a great way to see which things you need to follow up on. Here’s how to use the Tags and Filters features together to easily track them down and keep your projects moving forward.

1. Hovering over any task will give you the option to. In this example, we’ll create the tag “waiting for approval”.

   

2. Go the Everything area of your Teamwork Projects site.

3. Click on the  Active Tasks section and select the Filters icon on the right of your screen.

4. Enter your name in the Assigned To section.

5. Input the tag “waiting for approval” in the Tags section.

6. Send a passive aggressive note as a gentle reminder to the approver so you can get things moving again.

Bonus tip: You can share saved and unsaved filters so that any member of your team can see the information you are seeing based on your applied filter.

3. Quickly Find Any Unassigned Tasks

Sometimes, tasks aren’t immediately actionable, making it hard to decide who to assign them to. In Teamwork Projects, you can create these tasks and leave them unassigned. Unassigned tasks can also be used to keep track of ideas that you can revisit at a later date. To prevent these tasks from being neglected or forgotten you can use Filters to quickly locate them across all of your projects.

1. From the Everything area of your site go to Active Tasks and select the Filters icon.

2. Select the Filters icon on the right of your screen.

3. In the “Assigned To” section select “Include unassigned tasks.”

   

   Doing this will show every single unassigned task across all of your projects. Now you can give these orphaned tasks a home by assigning a user to take care of them. Bonus tip: If you’re responsible for managing a project, keeping track of and delegating unassigned tasks is something you probably do regularly. Saving the filtered view above can help you locate unassigned tasks at lightning speed, so you can make sure that nothing falls between the cracks (find out how to save Filters in this help doc).   

4. Filter Comments So Nothing Goes Unanswered

If you work with clients in Teamwork Projects, it’s likely that the majority of your communication happens in-app. To ensure clients’ questions are answered in a thorough and timely manner, you can use Filters to quickly locate any comments they might have left and check if your team has followed up. Here’s how:

1. From the Everything area of your Teamwork Projects site, go to the Comments tab and select the Filters icon.

2. To find comments left by clients, you need to filter by author.

   

3. You can choose one or multiple projects from which to see results.

   

   You can narrow down your results even further by filtering by comment type, date, status, and more. Further information on these filters can be found here.

5. Time Filtering

Even though subscription billing has become increasingly popular, a lot of agencies, consulting firms, and other client-based teams still bill clients based on the amount of time spent on a project — meaning they have to track how many hours they work for individual clients. In Teamwork Projects, you can use Filters to quickly generate a report with this information, download it as a PDF, and send to your clients. This report can be created from the Everything time section, or within an individual project.

1. From any Time area, select the filter icon to the right of the page:

   

2. You will now have various filtering options available within the right pane, to filter the results:

   • Project: See results for all projects or select which projects you’d like to report on.

   • Project status: Build your time report for projects of a certain status, such as current, late, or upcoming.

   • People: Build a time report for all site users or a select group. For example, users who are working on a specific project.

   • Date: Select a time frame for your time report.

   • Tags: Only include time logs with specific tags.

   • Billable: Include billable, non-billable or both in your time report.

   • Invoiced: Invoiced, non-invoiced or both in your time report.

   • Show/hide columns: You can include all columns or choose custom columns in your report.

3. Once you’ve set your required parameters, you can then hi.

4. Export your time report to a PDF, Excel or CSV file by clicking the Export button near the top right of the Time area.

   

   The use cases in this post are just a couple of ways to use Filters in Teamwork Projects. To discover all of the ways to use this feature, make sure to check out this help doc. We’d love to hear what you think. Do you use Filters in Teamwork Projects? Let us know how you use them to help you in your day-to-day workflows in the comments below.