Add CheckList/To-Do List Within Tasks

Hi Sarah,

Have you tried creating custom forms for checklists and add the custom form to tasks? 

Works best of you add the custom form to the task on the template.

Just throwing out that idea.

This idea of having a "Checklist" in tasks has been open since 2017...and here we are in 2025. 🤨

1) Yes, Boards does now have a checklist for a card BUT it creates subtasks if connected to a plan, which we do NOT want as we don't want to overcomplicate plans nor do we want all those tiny steps to show up on their timesheet.

2) If board cards have a checklist feature, can this be exposed on the task itself?

Why is this needed?

Worker have a lot of tasks already.  We do not want to create subtasks too that a PM needs to see on a project plan nor should they have to manage.

Workers may have a task such as "creative round 1 for deliverable x" that is due on a date.  This is the task that the PM manages in the plan.

But within this task, the creative worker has to do several small, checklist steps just for themselves:

create file, find images, color correct, upload to file server, upload proof, etc.

We want the user to be able to create their own checklist in a task (similar to a board/card but our teams don't like boards) where they can check them off when done.

Hi @rlazarevic,

I am familiar with your usecase (and business, in fact) from working with another Workfront based Engineering Firm where we solved it by attaching standardized Quality Assurance Checklists Issues to those Tasks that require such a checklist. Each such Issue can have many checklist questions (as standardized custom parameters), and can be attached one to many (Issues to Task) should a re-check be required.

This approach allowed them to avoid the subtask bloat you are describing, and to instead manage such checklists using our Open Issues solution as shown below. They then took it even further using our (not yet publicly listed) Quality Management Report solution to identify and improve common root causes of quality errors surfaced from such checklists.

If you'd like to learn more about this approach and/or either of our solutions, I invite you to contact me via doug.denhoed@atappstore.com.

Regards,

Doug

Hello, not having checklists within tasks is now one of the major obstacles to our adoption of Workfront. We use WF for technical/engineering projects, where activities need to be explained in detail, and the text-only task Description field is grossly insufficient. Our projects last up to 7 years, and can have more than 450 tasks in the end, since we are forced to use only sub-tasks. This is unmanageable - each (sub-)task comes with its own set of dates, task constraints, assignments, durations etc. Our end-users are very easily confused by all this, and then stop using Workfront altogether, which then has an impact on the accuracy of our management reporting etc.

We tried to make our projects "modular", which means have a top-level template (skeleton) and then attach mini-templates as the project progresses. This has proven unattractive and again cumbersome for our users. Imprecise as well, because very often a Milestone needs to come in in the middle of the mini-template, but for reporting reasons it needs to stay on the top-level and cannot be included in a mini-template. Not to mention that the dependencies cannot exist between mini-templates, so there's a lot of work in stitching the mini-template together when inserted.

I really don't understand why this cannot be implemented in Tasks if this feature already exists in Cards on Boards. I see now that this feature has been requested for 7 years now (since 2017), yet it was never acted upon.

Huge opportunity here - you can really expand your customer base to clients who have more complex projects by adding this simple feature (which you already did in Cards).

This is something I have been looking for as well and seems like it should be a standard function in WF. I would love to see this added but it seems like this is not something we will see anytime soon since the original request was in 2017 and in 2024 it has been thrown into the backlog.

Thank you for the submission! We think this is a good enhancement to the Workfront platform overall and this product area in particular!

Workfront currently prioritizes large-scale, foundational enhancements such as the new Reporting experience and changes to the core data model, so this item does not fit in our near-term roadmap. As such, I am marking this as Declined now, but we'll keep this in our backlog for the improvements for this area so that we can revisit the decision in the future.

Was just discussing this capability with a new user in our Forms Production process. Our project templates have generalized tasks assigned to analysts; who 'know the process'. That is, unless they're a new hire. My proposed workaround was to add a job aid as a document (maybe a macro enabled Word doc or a OneNote file) to the project template. That job aid would get copied down to each instance of a new project - providing the analyst the detailed description of the work to perform. The elegance here, in my mind, is that as the new analyst gains experience, the need for those detailed instructions decreases and they aren't obligated to fill in the checklist. They can just ignore the attached document.

Upvote!

I would love to build a quick check-list like in Wrike. For me, this ties into my wider idea of having a rich text task description, instead of the current plain text. for each task it would be awesome to have a description section where we could create check lists, images, links, rich text formatting. That way we can avoid needing to upload additional documents to a task just to give us more freedom to give more context and description and guidance for a task.

Upvote!

I would love to build a quick check-list like in Wrike. For me, this ties into my wider idea of having a rich text task description, instead of the current plain text. for each task it would be awesome to have a description section where we could create check lists, images, links, rich text formatting. That way we can avoid needing to upload additional documents to a task just to give us more freedom to give more context and description and guidance for a task.

This feature would add substantial simplicity to workflow templates and reduce friction. Have an upvote!