I have been trying to find a way to quickly and easily see my current and upcoming workload (and conversely, availability) in a visual way, based off my actual tasks and projects. I got close with some charts, but I can’t figure out a way for it to take into account all days that I am working on a task, it only counts tasks on the start or due date.
With all of my tasks I manually add a due date and the estimated time it will take, then I use a formula to automatically set the start date for me (e.g. task due on 10th, it’ll take me 2 days, Start date: 8th). I have then tried to find ways to use charts to display my workload over time, but can’t work out how to display a count of the total number of tasks per day, including when a task is spanning a day, not just the start and due dates.
Then it struck me - the timeline and calendar views already do this automatically to an extent. I feed in the start and due dates, and it knows that the task spans all days between those dates. So in theory, all it would take is for these views to also include a count of the total number of items (tasks in my case) for each day/week/month. Maybe this could work as a bar chart or line chart at the bottom of the timeline view, and perhaps in the calendar view the days/weeks could be colour coded based on the count per day (see attached ideas). Perhaps for colour coding a capacity or max. items per day field would be required.
Perhaps it would look something like this:
This would allow users to monitor all kinds of metrics easily and intuitively, such as workload, staff numbers etc. and as it would be visible directly within timeline/calendar views, users could easily move items around within the timeline/calendar to reduce bottlenecks and see it all in context with their item count (or workload chart) reflected in realtime, without needing to keep changing between views (or without even needing to create a separate report view with a chart for in the first place). In my use case, this would also allow me to easily see my upcoming availability and quieter days so I can easily see where to fit in new work and keep things steady.
—
A bit of background - I’m a creative consultant who has been freelance for 10 years. I work on multiple projects with multiple clients simultaneously and have struggled for years to find a project management tool that fits this use case. Most are based around teams and collaboration, and not clients/projects/tasks/workload focused for an individual. I have created a full app in Airtable that fits my needs in the past but it’s full of clunky workarounds, like a table full of rows for each day into the future in order to calculate workload per day, and it’s all dependent on some very convoluted formulas.
So, since finding Fibery a week or so ago I’m super excited by this amazing product, and it seems like an almost perfect fit for my needs and I’m sure the needs of lots of consultants like me!
