Priorities
Priority tells your team how important a task is and what to work on next — independently of where the task sits in the workflow.
Helpin supports five priority levels:
Priority | What it means | Color |
|---|---|---|
Urgent | The team should drop everything and address it now | Red |
High | Important; delaying it creates real risk | Orange |
Medium | Normal priority for planned work | Amber |
Low | Useful, but not time-sensitive | Sky blue |
None | No priority has been set | Grey |
Priority appears on the task card as a colored icon, in the create dialog, and in the task detail sidebar where you can change it at any time. Hovering a priority icon on a card shows the level's name (for example Priority: High).
Priority vs. workflow state
Priority and state answer different questions:
Priority says how important the work is.
Workflow state says where the work is in your team's workflow (for example Backlog, an in-progress state, or Done).
A task can be Urgent and not started — the signal to pull it forward — or Low and in progress, quietly finishing in the background.
Priority vs. severity
Severity is a separate field used mainly for bugs. Priority captures how much the work matters to the team right now; severity captures how badly a bug affects users. A bug that blocks checkout for many customers can be high severity while still sitting at low priority mid-release — and the reverse is possible too. Assign both fields so triage can weigh impact and timing separately.
Use priorities consistently
Keep priorities meaningful:
Use Medium for normal planned work.
Reserve High for work whose delay creates a real delivery risk.
Use Urgent sparingly — only when the team should interrupt current work.
New tasks start at the priority your team has configured (typically Medium), and you can change priority when creating or editing a task. Review priorities during sprint planning, backlog grooming, and triage so they reflect current judgment rather than the moment the task was created.
If a task is blocked, record the blocker on the task or link the blocking task — don't rely on priority alone to explain why work cannot move.
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