Good question! What is a project milestone?
Think of a project milestone as a marker in time where you stop and evaluate your project.
How is your project going? Have you completed everything necessary to move on to the next level? Have you finished everything in this milestone? And are you ready to move forward to the next one?
The video below shows what milestones look like in a Gantt chart, and how to track time to them. But normally you don’t actually track time to milestones. They are just markers in time, not actual tasks. But you can if you want to. In fact, you could set up a project with nothing but milestones! Just track hours to them and compare against your original estimates. That’s a simple way to track projects.
In the old days, a milestones was a physical stone erected by the road. There would be one stone every mile. Just count the stones as you waked along, and you would know how far you had traveled, and how far the next town was. They were just like our interstate mile markers now.
Project milestones are very similar. They tell you how far into the project you have traveled. Got a big project? Put up a milestone every so often and you’ll know where you are.