glossary — plain english
Task
One chunk of work on the plan, named the way your team talks and sized for the room — 'Design' is one bar, even if it's forty tickets.
A task is the unit the chart is built from: something with a beginning, an end, and a name people recognize out loud. "Design." "Build." "Taste-testing photos." If you'd say it in a standup, it's the right size for a bar.
The classic mistake is putting the issue tracker on the timeline. The chart is for the room, not the worker: "Design" stays one bar even when it's forty tickets, because the room needs to know when design ends, not how it's going ticket by ticket. Five to twelve tasks is the sweet spot for a plan people can actually read; past twenty you're writing a to-do list with dates on it.
Every task should carry a duration, its dependencies, and ideally a deliverable that makes "done" checkable. If you can't name what a task hands over, it's probably two tasks — or none.
See it on a real chart
Describe your project in plain English and ganttchart.ai turns it into a shareable Gantt chart in seconds — every term on this page included. Or read the method first: the plain-English planning guide.