Planner

In the Planner, you can keep track of and plan your team's work-time. It's easy to see exactly how much of your team's time is already booked, and which tasks and projects your team members are working on. The Planner makes it effortless to schedule new assignments for your team and helps to divide jobs proportionally among team members – no need to worry about overbooking.

To use the Planner, you first need to set up a schedule for your team members.

1. Go to Settings > Work and projects > Availability to add working hours for each user (read detailed instructions here).

2. Click on + New to enter a new schedule or open an existing one to view the details or modify.

3. Set working hours for each user separately or set the same working hours for all users in a user group. Setting up working hours is a flexible system. You can always create a new availability calendar for special cases like Christmas time or during the vacation period when people have different working hours.

Now that you've set up working hours for your team members, you can start using the Planner.

For more granular planning, you can either view the Planner in a week view or use the 3-week view.

If you wish to plan longer assignments related to longer projects, just use the 3-month view.

Tip! With the help of user tags, you can filter out users with specific skills when planning different jobs for your team. Another option is to filter users by teams. Read more on filters.

The striped area indicates that the working hours are limited. For example, if most of the team members work for eight hours a day, but one of them for six hours (set it up under the availability settings), the schedule for the team member with less working hours has a part of each day striped through. Thanks to that, you can tell just by looking at their schedule that their working hours are limited. The same goes for workdays that are shortened or days that are marked as national holidays.

The filters in the Planner allow you to choose what type of schedule you wish to see. The user filter enables you to choose specific users, or groups to filter users by teams.

You can also filter by projects or choose a specific project to plan the related tasks.

The height of the schedule can be switched between four views: compact, medium, high and extended. All views show hours left and the selected person's utilization in percentages. You can also quickly see their utilization by the progress circle around their photo. In addition, the indication of overtime is visible in all three views. 

Teams with a more flexible work schedule can also add weekends to their Planner. Choose Show weekends under View options.

In the case of planning tasks in the 3-month view, you can remove the project colors to make the Planner less noisy. Just untick the option Show project colors.

In the week view, to modify an already planned time entry, just hover on it and click on the pencil icon.

When clicking on the bin icon, the time entry becomes unassigned and goes back to the menu on the left. You can also just drag and drop the time entries back to the left-hand panel to unassign them.

The filters in the left panel affect the tasks that are not yet planned. When planning a task (dragging and dropping it from the left-hand panel to where needed) it becomes a scheduled time entry that is visible in the task list of the assignee. Read more on time entries.

You can also easily filter out unfinished tasks that have been fully planned (but also tasks without a planned duration), in case you and your team need to contribute some extra time to them.

The user filter allows you to choose whose (based on the owner) unplanned tasks are displayed. You can also refine the view by projects, activity types, deadlines, and priorities.

Click on + New to add a task.

To edit an unplanned task click on the priority tick of the task.
Just drag and drop the tasks to schedule them. As soon as a task is scheduled, the assignee will see the task (now a time entry) in their task list and can get to work.

You can either use the automatic scheduling or manually split longer tasks.

When manually splitting tasks, drag and drop the task on a suitable day in the Planner and use one of the three options:

1. Fill the available time slots in the schedule with the task.

2. Distribute the task between the selected dates without creating overtime. Either optimize and plan longer parts of the task on days with more availability, or split the task equally.

3. Squeeze in a more critical task that needs to be taken care of before everything else already planned. This will prioritize the task and postpone everything else in the schedule, with the exception of calendar events. Allow overtime will let you plan the task on one single day, most probably creating over hours for the task assignee.

Now the task becomes planned, but also time entries are created under the task, when looking at the task detailed view. The time entries are also visible in the task list with the planned dates.

When dragging and dropping a user’s time entry from the planning side back to the left-hand menu, the user is removed from the task (if they don’t have any other scheduled or done time entries under that task). When using the bin icon to delete a time entry from the Planner, the entry is removed from the task as it is with dragging-dropping, yet the user remains as a task assignee.

Note! If there's a grey triangle in the upper right corner of an unplanned task, it indicates that this task has a set deadline. A red triangle indicates that the deadline of the task has already passed. A blue one shows that the task deadline is today or tomorrow. Just hover on it to see the exact deadline or the days over the deadline.

The diamonds in the Planner view indicate project deadlines.

Note! Personal events are not visible in the Planner.