Understanding Tasks: The Building Blocks of Mind Dump

If you are using a Knowledge Base session to store your favourite recipes or manage a personal CRM, you might find it slightly unusual to click a button labelled "Add Task" to create a new entry.

To understand why this is, it helps to have a brief history of the platform. Mind Dump began its life purely as a highly capable task management system. Over time, its underlying architecture proved to be so flexible that it naturally evolved into a comprehensive, multi-purpose database and knowledge manager. While changing the button labels throughout the app would be technically simple, the developer deliberately chose to keep the term "Task" for continuity.

In the Mind Dump ecosystem, it is best to think of the word Task not just as a chore you need to complete, but as a universal data record.

The Role of Tasks as Data Storage Components

If a Session is your dedicated filing cabinet (your personal database), a Task is the individual manila folder you place inside of it.

Every single piece of information you put into Mind Dump is stored as a Task. Whether you are saving a website bookmark, creating a client profile, drafting a chapter of a book, or actually scheduling a doctor's appointment, you are creating a Task record in the backend.

A Task acts as a highly adaptable container. At its foundation, it holds core information like a title (task_text), a due date, an urgency level, and whether or not it has been completed. However, its true power lies in its ability to expand. When you add Custom Fields to a Session, those fields attach themselves directly to the Tasks within that Session, transforming them from simple to-do items into rich, multi-dimensional database objects.

How Task Data Drives Mind Dump's Features

Because every piece of data is structurally a "Task," Mind Dump's extensive features can interact with all of your information universally. The data held within a single Task acts as the fuel that powers the entire application's dynamic views and tools:

• Execution and Planning: A Task's due_date and estimated_time fields automatically feed into the Calendar View, allowing you to physically drag and drop your records onto an hourly schedule. These same dates power chronological Kanban Boards, dropping tasks into columns like "Today," "Tomorrow," or "Overdue".

• Visualising Workflows: If a Task contains custom data (like a dropdown field for "Project Phase"), the Kanban Board can dynamically group your Tasks into columns based on those specific field values.

• Building Hierarchies: Tasks possess the ability to link to a "Parent Task". This relationship data is what allows the Outline View to automatically generate complex, numbered document structures and the Mind Map to visualise branching, bilateral trees of information.

• Communication & Context: Every Task contains an "Activity Stream." This allows the Task to act as a hub for notes, but also as a direct link to your Email Inbox. Incoming emails can be attached to a Task as context, or an entire email can be converted into a brand new Task record itself.

• Knowledge Mapping: Tasks can be bidirectionally linked to other Tasks across completely different Sessions, creating a web of interconnected knowledge that you can easily navigate.

• AI Analysis: The rich data within a Task—including its custom fields, urgency, notes, and completion status—is packaged and sent to the AI Assistant. This allows the AI to provide deep contextual insights, generate daily digests, or draft content specifically tailored to that exact record.

By standardising every entry as a "Task," Mind Dump ensures that no matter what kind of information you are storing, you have access to the exact same powerful suite of organisational, visual, and analytical tools.