Timeline and planning

The Timeline tab

The Timeline draws every dated or estimated task as a bar on a calendar, grouped by list, with today marked. Zoom between Day, Week and Month, and press Today to scroll back to now.

Three kinds of bar:

• A solid bar is a task with a start and a due date.
• A diamond is a task with only a due date.
• A dashed bar is pencilled in: the task has an estimate but no fixed dates, so the planner has worked out when it will happen.

Weekends, bank holidays and company closures are shaded, and so is a person's own time off on their rows. Bars with a heavier outline are the critical path — the chain of tasks that decides when the project finishes.

Moving things

• Drag the middle of a bar to move the task; drag either end to change that date. A pencilled-in bar becomes real dates when you drop it.
• Tasks with no dates at all sit in the Unscheduled card below the chart, each with a Start today button.
• Click a bar to open the task drawer.

How the planner works

You do not have to date every task. Give tasks estimates and the planner lays them out for you:

1. A task starts the working day after the task above it in the same list — or later, if something it depends on is not finished.
2. It runs for its estimate in working time, skipping weekends, bank holidays, company closures and the assignee's own time off.
3. A parent task spans its subtasks.
4. The project finish is the day the last task ends. It shows in the project header and on Home as Finishes {date}, and any change that moves it tells you: "Finish moved 12 Nov → 17 Nov".

A task with its own start date is pinned and stays put; the planner works around it.

Dependencies

Open a task and use Depends on → + Add to say that it cannot start until another task has finished. You can add a gap in working days — "two days after the print run comes back". The task then moves on the timeline when the thing it depends on moves, and arrows join them.

The drawer explains why the task sits where it does: after what it depends on, after the task above it, with its parent, or from the start of the list, and whether it is on the critical path. A task pinned to a date earlier than its dependency allows is flagged in red rather than moved silently.

Milestones

A milestone is a date the project is measured by — a launch, a sign-off, a delivery. Add one from the strip above the List or Timeline with + Milestone.

• Give it a name, a date, an owner and, optionally, the task lists that lead to it. Their tasks become the milestone's progress bar.
• Choose what happens when the plan slides past it: a fixed date turns red when its work is planned to land late (a promise to someone), while moves with the work slides to the day its tasks will actually finish (a target).
• Milestones appear as diamonds and vertical lines on the timeline, on the Calendar, on Home, and in the weekly status update.

Plan health

The "N to look at" button above the chart opens the plan-health panel: everything the planner thinks you should know about.

• Starts too early — a task is pinned before what it depends on can finish.
• Time off — someone is away during their task.
• Milestone overdue or at risk — the work will land after the milestone's date.
• Overlap — one person has two tasks planned at the same time.
• Overloaded — a person has more estimated work in a week than the working week holds.
• No estimate — open tasks with neither an estimate nor a due date, so the planner cannot place them.

Click any line to open the task.

Freezing the plan

Once a plan is agreed, click Freeze plan. The timeline keeps a copy, and from then on shows grey ghost bars behind each task where it was, with a drift figure next to the finish date — +4d — so slippage is visible at a glance. Re-freeze replaces the copy; the × forgets it.

Working week and time off

All of this depends on the organisation's working week (hours for each day, bank holidays for your country, company closures), set by an administrator under Admin → Organisation → Work, and on each person's time off, which they add under My settings → Calendar. Two weeks off for one person moves their tasks and everything that waits on them.