How Should You Group Your Work? Splitting Projects by Job, Team or Period

When a team starts using a task management tool, the first thing that makes people stop and think is how to set up projects. Split things up too finely and nobody can find the work they are looking for. Lump too much together and people keep getting notifications about work that has nothing to do with them.

In this article, a “project” means the container a tool uses to group work. Some tools call it a board, a space or a list. This article explains a way of thinking about how to divide work that applies to any tool.

Note: this article is written by the developer of GeckoFlag.

The short answer: put work for the same audience in one project

When in doubt, ask yourself who needs to see this work. If the people who need to see it are the same, keep it in one project. If they are different, split it.

Most tools decide who can see what, and who gets notified, based on the members who belong to each project. If you split projects by who needs to see the work, information won’t be visible to people who shouldn’t see it, and notifications won’t go to people they don’t concern.

Three common ways to group work

Scroll the table sideways →

Grouping by job

This works well for work with a clear start and end. If the people involved change from client to client or from site to site, this is the natural choice. Because you can close a project once the job is done, you can see at a glance only the work that is currently moving.

Grouping by department or team

This works well for work that goes on every day: requests to general affairs for supplies, routine tasks at a store, and other work the same people always handle. Because it never ends, the contents keep growing. Adjust how you view it, for example by hiding completed items or sorting by due date.

Grouping by period

This works well for work that repeats every year or every month. Open the previous project, and you can go through the same preparations in the same order.

It’s fine to mix them

In practice, few teams can get by with just one way of grouping. A small builder, for example, might group each homeowner’s construction work by job, and the office’s day-to-day work by department. Mixing approaches is not a problem in itself. What matters is that when new work comes in, nobody has to wonder where it goes.

Three common mistakes

1Splitting things too finely

This is when someone creates a project for a single piece of work. A piece of work should be added as a task inside a project. As a rule of thumb, ask whether the project is likely to hold ten or more tasks, or whether it will run for several weeks or longer. If neither is true, put the work inside an existing project.

2Putting everything in one project

If everyone’s work goes into a single project, people get notifications about work that has nothing to do with them. Information that didn’t need to be shared may even become visible to people outside the company.

3Splitting by person

This is when projects are split by person, such as “Tanaka’s project.” Every time the person responsible changes, tasks have to be moved to another project. Show whose work it is with the task’s assignee, not with the project (how to choose assignees is covered in Part 4, “How to Set Assignees and Due Dates”).

How to name projects

• Make the name tell you what’s inside: “Company A Autumn 2026 Brochure,” “Station Store Renovation”
• Use a consistent order: decide on an order, such as client → content → timing, and projects become easier to find in the list
• Don’t create “Other” or “Misc” projects: once anything can go in a box, nobody can tell what’s in it

An example of what can happen

How to set this up in GeckoFlag

In GeckoFlag, members and guests can see only the projects they have joined (administrators can see all projects). That lets you put the idea of “splitting by who needs to see the work” directly into practice.

• For each project, you set a project name, a description, a project owner, start and end dates, and the members who take part
• The project key (up to five letters and numbers) goes at the start of each issue number. For example, if you set the key to “SHOP,” issues are numbered automatically as “SHOP-1,” “SHOP-2” and so on. Choose a short key that tells you at a glance what the work is
• You can mark finished projects as completed
• You can invite people from outside your company as “guests,” only to the projects they take part in (covered in Part 7, “How to Write When Working with People Outside Your Company”)

You can try the actual screens in the demo.

Summary

Group work into projects by who needs to see it. As a basic rule, group work with a start and end by job, ongoing work by department, and repeating work by period. Next time, we’ll look at how to write tasks inside a project so that people understand them.

RelatedWhy tools stop being used after rollout, and what to decide first, are covered in Part 5 of our beginner series “Your First Project Management Tool,” “Why Tools Go Unused After Rollout, and What to Decide First”

SeriesPart 2, “How to Write Tasks People Understand”