Tasks

Tasks are the smallest accountable unit of work that still carries deal context. They are not a generic personal to-do list: each item should answer who is responsible, what “done” means, and which transaction or mandate it protects.

When teams use Tasks well, pipeline reviews become honest, client commitments become traceable, and quiet stalls surface early instead of exploding in the inbox the day before a milestone.

Harold keeps Tasks close to deals, documents, and threads so context does not fragment across tools. The objective is forward motion with evidence — not busywork logging for its own sake.

Create a task when there is an explicit commitment, a dependency for someone else, or a date that matters to a client or internal control. If the work is exploratory or informational, a deal note or a linked thread may be enough.

If you find yourself duplicating the same explanation across email and chat, attach the thread, summarise the decision in the deal record, and capture the follow-up as a single owned task.

Avoid “placeholder” tasks that exist only to satisfy a ritual. If a task cannot be completed in a reasonable horizon, rewrite it into something concrete or close it with a documented reason.

Every active task should have exactly one accountable owner. Shared ownership without a name is how work silently slips, especially across time zones and coverage desks.

Owners can delegate execution, but they remain responsible for closure quality: attachments, links to evidence, and a short outcome note when the work is non-obvious.

Managers should review ownership during pipeline hygiene: overloaded names, tasks with repeated slips, and tasks that linger in “waiting” without a named counterparty.

Pipeline tells you what stage a deal is in; Tasks tell you what must happen next for the stage to be credible. Link tasks to deals so reporting and reviews roll up consistently.

Inbox often contains the first signal that a task exists. The discipline is to convert that signal into a dated task with an owner rather than leaving commitments in unstructured mail.

Documents and Tasks meet at review gates: before a pack leaves the firm, reviewers should be able to see that required tasks (model checks, sign-offs, third-party confirmations) are closed or explicitly waived with rationale.

Healthy teams show a steady completion cadence, realistic due dates tied to milestones, and few tasks stuck in ambiguous states. Unhealthy teams show duplicated tasks, orphan tasks with no deal, or “everything due Friday”.

Use task comments for short, factual updates — not long debates. Debates belong in meetings or deal notes with a summary captured where the decision lives.

If your desk runs recurring processes (weekly pipeline scrub, monthly mandate refresh), encode them as repeatable task patterns rather than ad-hoc heroics.

Use the Assignment tab for rules on single ownership and deal linkage. Due dates & urgency explains how to sequence work without training the organisation to ignore alarms.

Closure & evidence describes what “done” should look like when audits or clients ask questions months later.