Use the calendar and burndown views

Two views answer two different questions. The calendar answers “what lands when?”: deadlines laid out on real dates. The burndown answers “are we on pace?”: remaining work plotted against time.

The calendar view

Open a project and select the Calendar tab in the Work section. Tasks are placed by due date, and a task with both a start and a due date spans the days in between.

• Three zoom levels: month, week, and a year overview. The year view shows twelve mini-months shaded by how many tasks land on each day, which makes the crunch periods jump out.
• Filters: narrow the calendar by status or assignee.
• Overdue at a glance: a task past its due date and not yet Done is shown in red.
• Click to open: selecting a task on the calendar opens it for editing.

Tasks without a due date do not appear on the calendar; give them dates and they show up.

Tip

Use the assignee filter together with the week view before committing someone to new work. Five deadlines stacked on the same Thursday is obvious on a calendar and invisible in a list.

The burndown chart

Open the Burndown tab in the Plan section. The chart plots the project’s remaining tasks over its date range:

• The ideal line is a straight descent from the total task count to zero at the project end date. You can toggle it on and off.
• The actual line shows how many tasks were really left on each day, drawn up to today.
• A today marker shows where you are in the timeline.

Reading it is simple: actual above ideal means the project is behind pace, actual below ideal means ahead. The shape matters too; long flat stretches mean nothing was finished, and a cliff right before a deadline usually means statuses were updated late rather than work happening late.

If your organization uses sprints (a Pro plan feature), the same tab has a sprint selector that switches the chart to a per-sprint burndown for the sprint’s date range.

FAQs

Why does my burndown go up? The remaining count rises when new tasks are added mid-project. That is scope growth being recorded honestly, and it is one of the most useful things a burndown shows.

Does the calendar let me drag tasks to new dates? No, the calendar is for reading the schedule and opening tasks. To reschedule by dragging, use the Gantt chart; otherwise edit the dates on the task itself.

Is the burndown weighted by task size? The project burndown counts tasks, so a large and a small task each move the line by one. For effort-weighted tracking, look at the project progress rollup, which weights by estimated hours when every task has one.