What are Stuck Projects?
Stuck projects are the ones where stuff doesn’t get done. Clients do not realize the value (assets you create) of your work. And you very often don’t get paid. We built Hibiscus to help keep projects from becoming stuck and make it easier to pull them out of the ditch when they do.
Understanding Projects in Hibiscus
Hibiscus is a tool for freelancers and small agencies who deliver assets to clients—anything from blogs to infographics to social media videos. A project in Hibiscus is a collection of tasks aimed at producing and delivering an asset.
A healthy project is moving forward: it has active tasks being worked on, a deadline safely in the future, and a plan for asset completion and delivery.
The Stuck Project
When nothing is happening in a project, that project is stuck. The idea comes from David Allen's classic productivity system, Getting Things Done, and the first software implementation I encountered was Emacs Org-mode's heavily configurable version.
In Hibiscus, a stuck project meets two simple criteria:
It is not marked "completed."
It has no active tasks.
When detected, the project is flagged as "stuck" and appears in the Stuck Projects box on your dashboard with a red alert icon.
Hibiscus labels show a project’s status.
When a project is stuck, you will see this warning label on the Project detail page.
Un-sticking a Project
Stuck projects can cause tasks to fall through the cracks, assets to go undelivered, and clients to be disappointed—and you can't invoice for work that never shipped.
The danger is that without something calling attention to them, tasks are often disregarded or forgotten and stuck projects stay stuck. Freelancers juggling several small clients alongside a big one can easily let a smaller project get buried when a major engagement comes in.
The Dashboard is your friend.
The Hibiscus dashboard highlights all of your stuck projects. In a perfect world, none of your projects will ever be stuck, but just in case, this should keep them from falling through the cracks.
There are two straightforward ways to fix a stuck project:
Mark the project "completed." Head to the project's page, click Edit Project, and change its status to Completed.
Click Add Task and create a new task for the project.
What Task Type Should I Use?
Say you've submitted deliverables and are waiting to hear back from the client, or a subcontractor has gone quiet. Hibiscus has you covered with two task types well suited to this:
Project Management — A natural fit for follow-up work. Create a task like "Follow up with client" or "Check in with Linda," set a deadline, take notes, and spin up another task if needed.
Other — A catch-all for anything else that can move the project forward: sending an email, scheduling a meeting, or any action that doesn't fit a more specific type.
The Future of Stuck Projects
Projects can get stuck in other ways too. A project with many assets—say, 15 pages of a client website—can hide a forgotten or stalled asset even when other work is active. Stuck-asset detection is something we'd like to address.
We'd also like to make it easier to close out finished work. Manually marking projects "completed" can feel like overhead, so we're considering an option to auto-complete a project once all its assets have been submitted.
Most importantly, we want to hear from you. Is stuck-project detection useful? Are there other criteria you'd want? Hibiscus is built for freelancers and small agencies—let us know what would make this feature work better for you. Click here to learn more.
