Why Your monday.com Sub-Items Don't Show in Workload or My Work (And What to Do)
This is one of the most-upvoted complaints in the monday.com community forum. Here's the explanation — and the fix.
The Problem
You've assigned sub-items to team members. You've given them due dates and timelines. You open the Workload view expecting to see everyone's tasks neatly laid out — and sub-items are nowhere to be found. You check My Work from a team member's perspective. Same result: only top-level board items appear.
This isn't a bug. It's a deliberate architectural limitation — and understanding why it exists helps you find the right workaround.
Why This Happens
monday.com's Workload and My Work views were built on top of the board item model. An "item" in monday.com is a first-class object: it has columns, automations, and an identity that the platform understands. Sub-items are a different data type — they live inside items but aren't treated the same way by cross-board views like Workload and My Work.
Workload calculates capacity based on item-level timeline or effort columns. Sub-items have their own timelines, but those timelines aren't surfaced to the Workload view. From the view's perspective, those hours simply don't exist.
The community has been asking for this to be fixed since at least 2021. The thread "Workload for sub-tasks visualized jointly with workload for tasks" has hundreds of upvotes. monday.com has acknowledged the feedback but native support remains incomplete.
The Impact
This isn't just an inconvenience. For teams where the real work happens at the sub-item level — which is common in software development, content production, and agency project management — the consequences are significant:
- — Capacity planning is inaccurate because sub-item workload is invisible
- — Team members miss tasks because My Work doesn't show sub-item assignments
- — Managers can't see real utilisation when some team members work mostly on sub-tasks
- — Sprint planning and resource scheduling become guesswork
Workarounds (and Their Limits)
Option 1: Promote sub-items to items
The nuclear option — flatten your structure and make everything a top-level item so Workload and My Work can see it. This works, but you lose your hierarchy entirely. Complex projects become flat lists that are impossible to navigate.
Option 2: Mirror sub-item columns to items
You can use mirrored columns to pull sub-item data up to the parent item level, then use the parent's mirrored columns in Workload. This requires careful setup and breaks whenever the sub-item structure changes. It's a maintenance burden.
Option 3: Use a dedicated hierarchy app
Apps like TaskTree that add a proper task hierarchy layer on top of monday.com handle this natively — your full hierarchy is visible, assignees can see all their tasks regardless of depth, and workload reflects the actual shape of the work. This is the cleanest solution for teams that genuinely need nested tasks.
Which Workaround is Right for You?
If your projects are only one level deep (items with a handful of sub-items), option 2 is probably manageable. If you're running genuinely hierarchical projects — anything with phases, deliverables, work packages, and tasks — the mirroring approach won't scale and option 3 is the right call.
The tell is simple: if your team members are regularly asking "where are my tasks?" or your workload view never reflects reality, you've outgrown monday.com's native sub-item model.
Need sub-items that actually show up where you need them? Try TaskTree on monday.com →