What it is
Tasks on the canvas can carry small colored shapes above the card's top-left corner — the opposite side from the assignee avatars. Each one is a computed signal about the task's schedule or flow, and a task can carry several at once, side by side, worst first. Hovering expands one into a labeled pill with the shortest possible reason; its neighbors slide right to make room.
Most of them tell you the state of something. The deadline signals go further: they tell you what acting on this particular task would buy you.
How to read it
The deadline signals
These appear on tasks that sit on a project's critical path — the sequence carrying the most remaining work, and the part of a project that's hardest to compress.
- Red — "32d over deadline · 26% compensated." The project is projected to finish 32 days past its target. The percentage is this task's leverage: finish it now and roughly a quarter of that overrun goes away.
- Red with no percentage — "32d over deadline." The same overrun, with no leverage figure for this task: finishing it early isn't expected to move the date. Tasks early in the sequence often read this way, because the sprint calendar absorbs the gain before it reaches the end. Useful in its own right — it tells you effort here won't buy time.
- Green — "Pull in 5d → meet deadline." The overrun is fully recoverable through this one task. Green replaces the red circle rather than sitting next to it, because the story has changed from a warning to an instruction.
- Amber — "4d buffer · 50% compensated." The project still lands before its deadline, but with less than one of your team's sprints in hand. The percentage is how much of the missing buffer acting now would restore. The threshold follows your own sprint length, so a team on one-week sprints and a team on month-long ones each get their own idea of "tight".
The other signals
- Red hexagon — "Violated Dependency." Something this task waits on is scheduled to finish after this task needs it. It's a hexagon, not a circle, on purpose: this is a structural fact about how the work is wired, not a measurement of the schedule, and it usually has a different fix. See Dependency Status.
- Amber — "0.5d slack." The task is near-critical: less than a day of slack separates it from the critical path. Simply being on the critical path shows nothing — only a shrinking margin speaks.
- Purple — "Carried ×2" / "12d past sprint" / "×2 · 12d past sprint." The flow family: the task has been carried across sprints, is sitting past its sprint's end while still open, or both. One circle covers the whole family. See Spillover and Carry-Over.
Completed tasks never show anything, and the faded carry-over copies of a task in earlier sprints don't either — the signal always lives on the live card.
Why the card and the link can show different numbers
Hovering a critical-path link shows its own day count, and it won't always match the card's. That's deliberate, not a glitch — they answer different questions:
- The link reports where the schedule stands, measured against the sprints the work is currently assigned to.
- The card reports the velocity projection, because that's the only measure that responds when someone acts on a task. Starting a task earlier doesn't move it to a different sprint, so a "you can still recover this" figure measured against the schedule could never come true.
Read the link for the state of the plan and the card for what you can do about it.
What to do about it
Start with the hexagon. A violated dependency is an active wiring problem, and rescheduling the blocker often clears schedule pressure downstream at the same time.
Then use the percentages to choose where effort actually pays. On a late project the tasks showing a high "compensated" figure are the ones where finishing sooner genuinely pulls the date in; the ones showing a bare day count are not — no amount of pushing on those changes the outcome, and that's worth knowing before you staff them. A green circle is the strongest signal on the board: the deadline is still reachable, and the pill tells you the size of the move.
Amber with a percentage is the same logic applied earlier, while you still have buffer to protect rather than an overrun to repair.
A purple circle that keeps reappearing on the same task usually means the task is too big or is being repeatedly deprioritized — see Spillover and Carry-Over for how to read those patterns, and Dependency Status for the link-level view of the same schedule math.