Plan a project in 10 minutes with the dependency timeline
Planning a project usually feels like a second job, so most of us skip it and hope the order sorts itself out. Here is a ten minute version that leaves you with a plan you can actually trust.
The UnaTask team, Building UnaTask. Jul 6, 2026. 5 min read.
It is Monday, there is a new project, and the board is empty. You know the work. It is all in your head, roughly in order, with a vague sense of what has to happen before what. The trouble is getting it out of your head and into something the rest of the team can see, and that part always feels like a second job.
So a lot of the time we skip it. We start doing tasks and hope the order works itself out as we go. Sometimes it does. More often two people build on top of something that was not ready yet, and the plan you never wrote reveals itself the hard way, in a week you cannot get back.
Here is a version that takes about ten minutes and leaves you with a real plan, not a wish list. Open any project and go to the Dependencies tab. You are looking at a timeline: dates run left to right, and every task is a card you can move.
1. Jot the tasks down by typing them
Do not build a structure first. Click any empty spot on the timeline and type the task the way you would say it out loud. Draft the brief tomorrow, assign it to Sofia, mark it high. It reads the date, the person and the priority as you type, shows you what it understood, and drops the card where you clicked. Do it again for the next task, and the next. Order does not matter yet. You are just getting the work out of your head.
2. Drag them into rough time
Now grab the cards and slide them along the axis to roughly when each one happens. Early things to the left, later things to the right. You are not being precise, you are sketching. Ten seconds of dragging and the shape of the project is already on the screen.
3. Pull the wires
This is the part that turns a pile of tasks into a plan. Pull from one card toward the task it depends on, and a line appears between them. This finishes before that starts. Do it for the handful of links that really matter, the ones where someone is waiting on someone else. If you try to draw a loop, it politely refuses, so you cannot tie the plan in a knot by accident.
4. Set durations, then Recompact
Drag the left or right edge of a card to say how long the work takes, so a two day task and a two week task look like what they are. When it all feels a little loose, click Recompact once. Every task slides back against the thing it was waiting on, the gaps close, and you get the tightest honest version of the plan.
A plan is just the work, in the order it actually happens.
Ten minutes later
Look at what you have. Real dates. Honest dependencies. A picture the whole team can read in a glance, where you can already see the week that is going to be tight and the person who is going to be buried. You did not fill in a single form to get here.
Planning was never the chore. The paperwork around planning was, and we took it out. Open a project, give it ten minutes on the timeline, and let the plan carry the order so you do not have to hold it in your head anymore.