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Triage the backlog

New tasks start life in the Backlog — a parking lot for work that's captured but not yet scheduled. When you're deciding what to pull in next, the Backlog view gives you that list on its own, sorted so the most important work is already at the top.

Open the Backlog view

Click Backlog in the sidebar (just below List). You'll see every task whose status is Backlog, as a flat list — no parent/child nesting, just the work itself.

How it's ordered

The Backlog view is always sorted by priority, highest first:

  1. High priority tasks
  2. then Medium
  3. then Low
  4. then tasks with no priority set, at the bottom

Each level gets its own colour-tinted section heading with a count — High (red), Medium (amber), Low (slate), and No priority (grey) — and the tasks beneath it carry a soft wash of the same colour, so you can see the shape of the backlog at a glance. Priority bands always stay in that order (High above Medium above Low above No priority) — there are no sortable column headers here, because the whole point of the view is to keep the most urgent band at the top. Within a band you set the order yourself by dragging (see below); tasks you haven't ordered fall back to due date (soonest first), then title.

To move a task into a different band, give it a higher or lower Priority (see below) — or just drag it across the divider.

Reorder within a band

Within any priority band you can drag a task up or down to set its exact order — so you can say which of your High tasks is #1, which is #2, and so on, and it sticks.

  1. Press and drag a task's row (grab anywhere on it — a plain click still opens the task).
  2. As you move, the other tasks slide apart to open a gap and the row you're dragging shows as a grey strip exactly where it will land; a tooltip by the cursor tells you what will happen ("Reorder X within High").
  3. Release. The task settles into that gap and stays there.

Drag across a band divider to do two things at once: the task's priority changes to that band and it lands at the position you dropped it (the tooltip reads "Move X into High"). All four band headings stay on screen even when a band is empty, so you can drag a task straight onto an empty band's heading to give it that priority. New tasks — and any task whose priority you change — start at the bottom of their band, so your careful ordering isn't disturbed; just drag them up from there.

Every reorder is reversible with Ctrl+Z (Cmd+Z on macOS), and everyone viewing the backlog sees the new order live. (Reordering is available to editors and admins; if your access is read-only, rows aren't draggable.)

Edit without leaving the view

You edit here just like in the List view:

  • Priority — change it inline in the Priority column. The list re-sorts immediately.
  • Status — change it inline in the Status column. Moving a task out of Backlog (to Not started, In progress, and so on) is how you schedule it — it disappears from the Backlog view and shows up on the board and in the List.
  • Anything else — click a row to open the full task detail panel on the right (title, description, assignees, dates, dependencies, comments).
  • + New task — adds a task; new tasks start in the backlog, so it appears here right away.

Narrow the list

The filter bar carries over the controls from the List view that make sense for a flat backlog:

  • Assignee — show one person's backlog work (press / to jump to it).
  • Priority — e.g. just the High items, or No priority to find untriaged tasks that still need a level.
  • Stage, Parent, Due — the same filters as the List view.
  • Show only my tasks — your backlog only.

Filters share their settings with the List and Board views, so a filter you set here carries across when you switch. When any filter is active, a Clear filters link resets them all.

Backlog vs. the board

The Backlog is work you haven't started; the board is work in flight. Grooming the backlog here and moving a task out of Backlog is exactly how it lands on the board — see Statuses and stages.