How Workload counts a week

Workload answers one question: who has too much next week? To answer it honestly, the grid has to decide what "has" means for every kind of task a project contains. Here are the decisions, and why.

Which week a task belongs to

Weeks start on Monday and are counted on whole days, so a task is never half in one week because of a time zone. A task with a start and a finish counts in every week it touches. A task with only a due date counts in the week it is due. A task whose last date is before today goes to an Overdue column, one beyond the eight weeks shown goes to Later, and one with no dates goes to No date. Nothing is hidden; every open task is in exactly one cell, or in one of the three columns.

Spreading points

In Tasks mode a task is one unit in each week it touches, which is what a person feels: "I have that one next week too." In Points mode a ten-point task over two weeks would wrongly read as twenty, so the points are spread over the task's weekdays and each week gets its share. Weekends are left out, because a plan that assigns work to Saturdays is a plan with a different problem.

Who it counts for

A task counts for its assignee and for every co-assignee, since all of them will spend time on it. Unassigned tasks get a row of their own at the bottom, which is usually the most interesting row in the grid.

Capacity is a color

Each person sets their own capacity, in tasks and in points a week. Nobody else can set it for them, and until they do, a default of five tasks or fifteen points applies. A cell turns amber at eighty percent of capacity and red past it, and a thin line along the bottom shows how full the week is.

It is a color, not an alarm, because the right response to an overloaded week is a conversation, not a notification. The cell opens to the list of tasks; from there a task can be handed to someone else or pushed a week, moving its start, finish and due date together. The grid updates, the color changes, and the conversation has a picture.