There are three ways to record and assign work: Tasks, User Stories and Actions. Each has their purpose and knowing how to use them will keep your project organized and running smoothly. The easiest way to tell them apart is to think of how they work with time. 

 

Tasks

Tasks are the biggest of the three. Those are what the team will log time against and what you’ll use to bill the client. When you create a project plan, you budget hours for tasks. The work is defined, and the time is estimated and allocated to the tasks. For example, “Data Migration” could be a task that’s part of your project plan and has budget hours. 

User Stories

User Stories don’t need to define the work at the start of the project, which means you don’t need to budget time for them. You add them under a task at any point in the project. This allows for late definition of the work in an agile approach. Continuing with the example above, if the parent Task is “Data Migration”, the User Story could be “Define the fields”. Time spent on a User Story only rolls up to a Task once a User logs actual time. 
 

Actions

Actions are the smallest items. They are often too small to track time towards, but they're important enough to record. Things like “Send status update to client” or “Schedule meeting” are great Action items. They're also helpful when you want to assign items to the client. Time isn’t logged against Actions.