Tasks and Meetings: dates with and without times

[Tom_Glatt]

I'm curious how others address this challenge. In our project management base we have a combination of tasks and meetings. Tasks do not really need times, only start and/or due dates. Meetings, on the other hand, need both dates and times. 

Our current solution is to use multiple date fields. Start and end date fields for tasks, and start and end date/time fields for meetings - essentially four fields.

Anyone do something different or better, or more efficient?

[Stephen_Orr1]

The easiest way I can think of would probably be adjusting editor habits to always include valid times in the date entries for both tasks/meetings. Task end dates could be EOD (unless a hard deadline is a meeting or something else).

You can enable time on the date field when configuring the field settings:

And then editors can adjust the time by double clicking on the time value in the cell:

Re: the Gantt view, milestones if enabled work by only supplying an end date. So this makes me think you might use the same end-date-only approach for meetings (depending on if you're syncing to an external calendar like outlook/google calendar, this might not be better but I haven't tested this). 

Personally, I probably would only include BAU stage gate meetings as "tasks" that are part of the standard process for projects in Airtable. Like if a review meeting or approval meeting was always part of the process. If I wanted a record of all meetings that were held to support a task, I would create a separate table to link to tasks or just keep a long-text Notes/Action Items field updated after each meeting.

[Tom_Glatt]

The idea of adjusting editor habits is helpful. Sometimes one can get hung up in how things are "supposed" to be - so just changing a mindset opens up new opportunity. For us that would mean tasks should have a beginning of day time (e.g., 8am) tied to the start date, and an end of day time tied to the end/due date. We got the Create Records for Multiple Templates working properly (thanks to your assistance!) - and so for tasks we can set a default day and time in our templates which we can then adjust as we plan projects (but the times would be already set - which would be helpful!).  

We do sync to google calendar to automate sending calendar invites with google meet links so having meeting day and time details is critical for us.