What it is
Tasks on the canvas can carry small colored circles above the card's top-left corner — the opposite side from the assignee avatars. Each circle is one computed signal about the task's schedule or flow, and a task can carry several at once, side by side. Hovering a circle expands it into a labeled pill with the shortest possible reason; neighboring circles slide right to make room.
How to read it
The colors follow the same language as dependency links, plus purple for flow:
- Red — "Nd over deadline." The project's critical path is scheduled to finish N days after its deadline, and this task sits on that path. This is the same number the project's dependency links show.
- Amber — "Nd buffer." The critical path still lands before the deadline, but only just — a few days of schedule buffer remain.
- Orange — "Proj. Nd late." At the team's actual velocity, the remaining critical-chain work projects to finish N days past the deadline, even if the schedule still looks fine on paper.
- Red — "Blocked." The task is the blocked side of a Violated dependency — the thing it's waiting on is scheduled to finish after this task needs it.
- Amber — "N.Nd slack." The task is near-critical: less than a day of slack separates it from the critical path.
- Purple — "Carried ×N" / "Nd past sprint." The flow family: the task has been carried across N sprints, is sitting N days past its sprint's end while still open, or both ("×N · Nd past sprint"). See Spillover and Carry-Over.
Deadline-related pills append the critical chain's progress, like " · 60%", so you can tell a late chain that's nearly done from one that's barely started. Completed tasks never show circles, and the faded carry-over copies of a task in earlier sprints don't either — the signal always lives on the live card.
What to do about it
Red circles are active conflicts: an over-deadline chain needs scope, staffing, or the deadline itself to move, and a Blocked task needs its blocker rescheduled — start there. Orange is the early warning that trends before the schedule admits it. A purple circle that keeps reappearing on the same task usually means the task is too big or repeatedly deprioritized — see Spillover and Carry-Over for how to read carry-over patterns, and Dependency Status for the link-level view of the same schedule math.