A task you assign comes back with one of two answers, and they are not the same. Reading which one you got is the whole of this page.
The two answers
"Marked done" — they did the thing.
"Could not do this" — they did not, and the note beside it says why. This is a real answer, not a failure to answer. A participant who explains that their school will not release a transcript has told you something useful about the plan.
Both land in the same place and both wait for you. The card says which one you have, and any note they wrote sits directly under it — you do not have to open the activity log to find the sentence that explains the card.
The two verbs
Approve settles a task that was done.
Close it settles a task that could not be. The button changes its own word because the record does: closing writes "Closed — could not be done", not "Approved". A plan that says a person completed work they told you they could not complete is a plan that misreports them, and the participant sees this record too.
Request revision sends it back, and takes a note. That note is the point — "try again" without a reason is a task the participant now has to guess at.
What the participant sees
They are notified either way, and the notification uses the same word you did. Approving sends "Task #12 approved". Closing sends "Task #12 closed" — no exclamation mark and no claim that the work happened.
Requesting a revision sends the task back with your note attached.
Tasks the product asks for itself
Some rows are the product's own questions — the reaction ask that goes out with a suggested occupation, for example. Those have no review buttons, and that is deliberate: nobody wrote them and nobody needs to approve them. They close themselves as answers arrive.
If a task has no Approve or Close it control, this is why.
Where to do it
The drawer on the Planning Board tells you a task is waiting and points at the Tasks tab. It does not carry the verbs itself.
That is on purpose. The considered decision — sending something back with a reason — needs room for the note, and one action belongs in one place. A second set of buttons on the drawer would be a second place to make the same decision, and the two would eventually disagree about what happened.
Related
- The Planning Board — where tasks are attached to goals
- Sending a plan for signing — what the tasks are building toward
- Revising a signed plan — when the plan itself changes