Are your projects similar enough that you can do standard time budgeting? E.g.,
Project Category: Editing
Task 1 -- 30 hrs
Task 2 -- 15 hrs
...
Task 6 -- 6 hours
Standard Time Budget for "Editing Projects": 80 hrs
Standard Duration: 3 weeks
If you can get a rough handle on standard project budgets, then the 10,000 foot view is a matter of knowing:
For the next four weeks:
- Available work hours 240 (freelancers never work 40 hr weeks)
- Required tasks (get this info from OmniFocus estimated durations): 180 hrs
- Overhead tasks (time accounting, billing, etc.): 20 hrs
- Buffer for unanticipated work: 20 hrs
- Total committed time: 220 hrs
- Uncommitted time: 20 hrs
In that scenario – you have no time for a new project to complete, but if you slide the four week horizon forward to looking at the four weeks starting in two weeks, you might.
This kind of scenario playing at the high level can give you an idea of when you can slot commitments into your work plan.
At that point, you need to come down from the 10,000 foot level and spend time with the calendar.
This is an exercise you can do on paper, or in Excel / Numbers. I wouldn’t waste the effort to shoehorn time budgeting into software – you know your work and you know the gotchas. It’s all a matter of training yourself to spend time each week looking out over a planning horizon of 4 to 6 weeks. I know from my own consulting practice that planning my time and commitments beyond that time is forgetting that time demands coming from clients will make any longer-term plans unreliable.
Very interesting task manager for this purpose is Taskade. It has lists, boards, actions and mind map views of tasks/projects. I tried it, but it seemed too “beta” for my taste and did not have some basic features like url links. But it definitively seems like an app with a great future.
Hey Martin! The shortcut I made was inspired by the Mermaid.js diagram action in Drafts. It grabs a filtered set of reminders, formats those inputs into Mermaid syntax then pushes output through Mermaid for rendering. So it can do anything Mermaid allows (with edits to the template the shortcut uses).
Mermaid syntax does allow for changing the date format it expects to receive and the axis format it uses for the timeline legend. Haven’t yet managed to get that working for an “hours and minutes” Gantt chart as you’ve asked about, but in theory it should be possible…
And if not, I recommend Toggl to see how long things do take. Toggl also works well with a Stream Deck for starting timers with a button press. It’s probably the lowest friction time tracking I’ve ever done.
Where most tools fall short is being able to do some basic form of calculations to sum up how much time in total is budgeted, spent and what the progress is.
I’ve used Google Sheets for that in the past. I created a new sheet in the document for every project. Each sheet had a column for tasks and one for a rough estimation of how long each task would take. Buffers and uncertain tasks were also added in advance based on previous experience from similar projects.
In the first rows, the header of each sheet’s columns, I did time and progress calculations, mostly summing up the diifferent numerical values for progress or durations.
I also had a column to enter the estimation of the task’s fulfillment in percent and I color coded the task’s rows accordingly. 0% = white, then gradually from red over yellow to green and if the task was 100% done it additionally got crossed out.
In sheet one I used a script to pull in data from all those individual project sheets in the top half.
This is also were I set the general parameters like how much time I have to devote to the projects per week and how many weekdays there are accounting for holidays and vacation.
It loosely followed the “12 week year” idea. So I planned out a span of a year’s quarter including buffer weeks and a subsequent week of rest the 13th week.
Below that I put columns for each day of the 12 weeks similar to a 7-day calendar view, but just for 12 x 7 = 84 days. So the 12 weeks were visible at once and you can’t get lost in detail calendar views of just a week or month.
Back then I planned in hourly blocks so each day got 8-10 of those blocks as rows.
Each project had a “shorthand” so “graphic design client x” would become “DX” for example. In the 84 day overview I filled in the columsn accordingly. I grouped days together to work on a project in bulk and filled the day’s slots by copy and pasting the shorthand. When scheduling I always cross checked with fixed calendar appointments. The cells also got color coded with the color that matched the project via conditional cell formatting. And the sums across the 84 days for each project were calculated and compared to the required estimation in the top half of the sheet.
The only downside of this approach was that it wasn’t fun to use when on the go and absent from a larger monitor. And it was inconvenient to expand once the 12 weeks got near to their end. I nowadays would probably not stick to the 12 week schedule and instead have it as an ongoing plan. And I also wouldn’t schedule 8-10h. I’d probably just aim for 6 solid productive hours devoted in a focused manner entirely to each project.
LOL, my secretary, oops I mean executive assistant, prints out a list of matters that I need to attend to each week. She’s really good, and better than any software, I assure you!
I’ve used a SaaS for over a decade called Liquid Planner. It’s not cheap but its super power is the way you give it a ranged estimate for every task, and then it does the statistical processing to give you confidence intervals at different lengths of time (“you’re 50% likely to get it done by this date”). Of course, GIGO, but over time, it’s become very reliable for me. There’s a great feedback loop where I say how long I think something will take, then I track the time it actually takes, and finally, Liquid Planner makes it easy to compare my estimate to my actual.
I juggle a lot of projects and my favorite tools for this kind of higher-level planning and for knowing if I should say yes or no to a new opportunity are:
Aeon Timeline - very flexible for project management if you’re willing to dig under the hood a little:
A full year wall calendar like the Focused branded one that @MacSparky and @mikeschmitz put together. It’s literally always “on,” so, I always see it and therefore I’m always processing my current and future commitments:
I have wrestled with this problem as well. I use all the things: OmniFocus, reminder apps, TaskPaper, etc. But for just mapping out what the main thing I want to devote any particular week or even month to, I have landed on a very simple solution. I downloaded an Excel year calendar template, and made a bunch of rectangles that occupy the space of 7 days on the calendar. Then I just put a label on these rectangles (e.g. “The Henderson project”) and move them around on the calendar. I know there will be lots of other things to do from day to day, and those things are all in OmniFocus or whatever, but by looking at this Excel calendar I can see whether or not I have room for another big project in any particular week or month. Good luck on your search!
I totally agree! There’s a danger of getting hung up on the tool and neglecting the underlying information that you need to make the decision.
Of course, no estimate is accurate. In fact, at least at the beginning, I’d recommend you double whatever estimate you come up with. But if you follow this practice each time you take on a project - and then monitor the time it ACTUALLY takes to complete the project (I use Toggl), over time you will get a much higher accuracy rate. Still always good to leave some white space for the unforeseen though!
Maybe it was because my life was simpler then, but years ago, I had a yellow notepad and I would budget projects in pomodoros. Every line on the left would have the sort of high level goal (e.g. design logo) and the right side of the page I’d draw however many boxes (pomodoros sessions) it should take to do that task (e.g. four boxes).
I’d count up pomoodoros, divide by two, multiply that number by my hourly rate, and pitch that to a client. If I got the job, I’d begin work on any given line, crank the timer, and try to finish it in fewer pomodoros than I budgeted for a better rate.
All my projects were contained in this notebook and everything was already budgeted out time-wise, so adding new projects was a fairly simple review/calculation. It worked really well, but it just doesn’t seem possible now. There are some apps that allow you to budget pomodoros for each task, but they fall short in other ways.
Pomodoro blocks never worked for me. Once I have momentum on a task it is really hard for me to let go when the timer gets off. And if there is momentum I might work for 4h or more straight and I’ll be surprised that time did fly by so quickly. The 25 min. timer kicks me out of that “flow”. Even if I decide to not take the 5 min. break and restart the timer for the next block to have a lightly longer pause block at the end. It just seemingly makes the system less rigid and still doesn’t help to improve my estimations.
I really struggle to put a somewhat precise time estimation on longer projects with steps that by nature are not entirely clear and might also require some serendipity. As an example, which is accessible for most might be “writing your first book” (no plans, just a good example). I think everybody has a rough idea what steps would be necessary, but it is hard to put a time cap on each of them. Especially when the task involves iterations and a constant back and forth between research and creation.
Are there any tricks that work for you?
Another interesting tidbit: I listened to a podcast with one of the guys from Basecamp and he said that they strictly subdivide their large scale projects into features, which are individually developed in chunks of max. 6 weeks by teams of max. 3 people. If it takes longer or requires more people it has to be stripped down to meet the criteria. During this time the small team’s only responsibility is this feature and they can stay away from all other things going on in the company.
It’s an interesting approach to break down tasks, but I fail to apply that logic to my own projects, where I mostly work as a solo freelancer. Especially since you very rarely have just one project going on.
I don’t think I ever thought of my days in pomodoros, but I do still think of a good many of my tasks in that framing. For example, here’s a recent-ish attempt to estimate work required for some interviews.
When I started doing pomodoros (I think it was around 2007, but hard to remember for sure), I read this 40-page PDF (I still have it!) that Francesco Cirillo made freely available at the time. He suggested spending your first few pomodoros reading through it to learn the method. It seems like the technique has become mostly about focus/deep work, but his framing in that eBook was that it’s a way to gain awareness of internal/external distractions and get better at estimating.
To bring it back to the OP, and @anon41602260, an earlier contribution you made to this discussion… I guess I’m saying that, in my experience, good estimates are a way to get better at having perspective on one’s work, and PT is a way I’ve used to get better at estimating.
In my experience, those two say a lot that sounds good (and with such conviction!), but never works for me. Like a really awesome cookbook with crappy recipes.
Over the weekend, I purchased QuickPlan Pro. It’s ok, but not exactly what I’m looking for. But just now, I realized that Trello released a new timeline view that looks interesting. I might give it a spin as we are already using Trello.
