Your first week with RyTask

You have RyTask running and your first task tracked (if not, start with the quickstart). This tutorial walks through the habits that make RyTask pay off in week one: capturing work the moment it appears, tracking time honestly, and keeping on top of what needs you.

Capture from Slack

Most interruptions arrive in Slack, so that is where capture should live. Once an owner or admin has connected your Slack workspace (Settings → Integrations), anyone can create a task without leaving the conversation:

1. In any Slack channel, type /task followed by the task title — for example /task Fix the login redirect #bug !high. The same shortcuts work as in the app's quick-add: @name, #label, !priority, ^date.
2. Or type /task with nothing after it to open a small form where you fill in the details.
3. Slack confirms the new task with its ID, and it lands in your team's default capture project.

Set up the connection, the default capture project, and the mapping between Slack accounts and RyTask accounts in the Slack guide.

Track time against an estimate

The habit worth building: before you start a task, give it an estimate; while you work it, run the timer.

1. Open the task and set the Estimate field to the hours you expect.
2. Click Start timer when you begin. You can only have one timer running at a time — starting work on something else means deciding what to do with the current timer, which is the point.
3. Stop the timer when you switch or finish. The entry is saved against the task.
4. Forgot the timer? Add a manual entry on the task — a duration, or a start and end time.

The plan-vs-actual meter lives inside the task row, so the answer to "how is this going?" is always visible: a fill for logged time, a tick for the plan. When logged time passes the estimate, the meter turns red and shows how far over you are. No estimate means no judgement — the meter just shows what you have logged.

More in the time tracking guide and on capture shortcuts in fast capture.

Keep your inbox clean

Click Inbox in the sidebar. Everything that needs your attention arrives here: you were assigned a task, mentioned in a comment, someone commented on your task, a status changed, or something is due soon or overdue.

A clean-inbox routine that takes two minutes:

1. Work through the Unread tab top to bottom.
2. Done with one? Mark it read.
3. Not now, but soon? Snooze it — it disappears and resurfaces when the snooze ends.
4. Never need it again? Archive it.

The unread badge on the sidebar tells you at a glance whether anything is waiting.

Find anything

Two ways, and both are fast:

1. Press Cmd+K (Mac) or Ctrl+K (Windows/Linux) anywhere in the app to open the command palette. Type a few letters of a task, project, or page and jump straight to it.
2. Use the Search page from the sidebar when you want to browse results rather than jump.

Connect an AI agent

Anything you can do in the RyTask UI, an AI agent can do through RyTask's MCP server — create and update tasks, log time, comment, search. To connect one:

1. Go to Settings → Agent access. It shows the MCP server address with a copy button.
2. Mint a personal access token there. The secret is shown once — copy it somewhere safe. You can scope tokens down and revoke them at any time.
3. Point your agent (Claude, or any MCP-capable client) at the address with the token.

The agent acts as you, with your permissions — nothing more. Step-by-step client setup is in Connect an AI agent.

See where your time went

Reporting — the "My week" summary and the planned-vs-interruption time report — is in progress and lands in the next release; see Reporting for what is coming.

A rhythm to aim for

By the end of week one, a good day looks like this:

1. Morning: open the Inbox, clear it, glance at your tasks.
2. All day: capture interruptions the moment they land — /task in Slack, quick-add or Cmd+K in the app. Ten seconds, then back to work.
3. While working: timer on, timer off. Estimates on anything bigger than half an hour.
4. The meters tell the honest story of plan versus reality — and that story is what makes next week's plan better.