Grouping and Linking Activities

Organizing your activities in a good way is a precondition to effectively manage activities. If you look at a flat list of thousands of tasks it is simply impossible to make any sense of that information. openCRX provides a key concept to organize your activities: the openCRX Activity Tracker can be used to group and categorize sets of activities, people related to these activities (we call them "participants"), work records, etc. For example, you could use an Activity Tracker to keep track of a product design project (i.e. all the project activities, milestones, project members, work records related to the project, etc.), a software development project (look at the use case Bug Tracking, a support contract with one of your customers, to manage your personal Personal To-Do List, etc.

In addition to activities and participants you can also attach categories and milestones, allowing you to further structure/segment activities. Both of these concepts are explained in detail in the sections Category and Milestone.

A lot of useful information is aggregated at the level of Activity Trackers (see Reports), but they also constitute a good starting point to explore the "ecosystem" of activities belonging to a project, etc. The following figure shows a screen shot of the Activity Tracker used to group the Tasks shown in Figure 4-9:

Thanks to pre-defined filters it takes a single click to find out which open activities are due next, in which order activities are scheduled, or what the highest priority open activities are. Consolidated numbers regarding estimated effort, actual effort, etc. are also available at the click of your mouse.