The awork Planner Guide

1. Setup - The Foundation for Smooth Planning 🛠️

Before you can start planning, you should prepare a few important things. This ensures your planning is realistic and doesn't end up in chaos.

The planner in awork connects your project management with your calendar. You can align tasks, meetings, and bookings directly with your team's capacity.

For this to work, you need a solid setup.

What belongs in your setup:

• Set your holiday region: So you know when your team is enjoying some well-deserved time off.
• Activate calendar integration: Connect your Google or Outlook calendar, either yourself or centrally as an admin for your team.
• Configure work hours correctly: Nobody wants to be scheduled for 8 hours a day if they only work part-time. So set your work hours!
• Maintain absences: Vacations, sick days, and so on belong right in the planner. You can even automate this through integrations with Personio or MOCO.
• Add skills and roles: Use tags to keep track of who can do what.
• Check permissions management: Who's allowed to see or edit projects and tasks?

💡 Tip: Remind your team to set these preferences right from the start. It saves a lot of confusion later on.

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2. The Planner Views at a Glance 👀

Project View

• Shows you all active and planned projects
• Use filters (e.g., by team or priority), sorting, grouping, and columns
• Plan directly in the timeline with drag and drop
• Need to extend or move projects? Just drag them or adjust in the popup

User View

• See your team members' tasks, bookings, and calendars here
• Filter by skills, tags, or projects
• Use the workload bar to spot overbookings
• Assign tasks directly, move them, or add comments

💡 Tip: You can also display your team's calendars via the user icon, so you keep an eye on meetings and routines too.

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3. Plan Projects Smartly - From Big Picture to Details ✨

In awork, you can build, structure, and align projects with your team's available capacity. You can decide flexibly whether you want to plan roughly or in detail, or combine both approaches.

Create project structure:

Every project thrives on structure. Think about:

• What should tasks and subtasks look like?
• What deadlines and budgets exist?
• Which tasks need a time budget?
• Which people or teams will be assigned to the project and individual tasks?

And this is really important: don't just think about traditional tasks. Emails, calls, and feedback loops take time too. Plan for them!

Use task statuses like "Open", "In Progress", "Blocked", or "Done" to stay on top of things.

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4. Rough or Detailed - You Decide! 🎯

Rough Planning: The Overview for Weeks and Months

If you need a quick overview or prefer to plan on a weekly level, rough planning with bookings is perfect for you.

With bookings, you reserve capacity without planning every task in detail right away. This is ideal when:

• Tasks aren't concrete yet,
• you plan weekly (e.g., in your standing meeting every Thursday),
• or you just want to block rough time windows.

Here's what you should keep in mind:

• Bookings distribute evenly over time.
• They affect workload but don't shift automatically.
• No time is tracked on bookings - they're just reservations.
• Use the user view to see how much capacity everyone has left.

Detailed Planning: For Maximum Transparency in Daily Operations

Detailed planning is perfect when you want to plan day-by-day and always keep your team's workload in view.

Here you work directly with tasks that:

• Have start and end dates,
• come with time budgets,
• and can either have time tracked on them or be scheduled in your calendar.

Important: Tasks without times or calendar entries automatically get pushed into the future, so your workload stays accurate.

💡 Tip: Rough and detailed planning work wonderfully together. Use bookings for advance planning and replace them once you have concrete tasks.

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5. Changes? No Problem! 🔄

Planning is never set in stone. With awork, you stay flexible even when something comes up.

Here's how you do it:

• Hold weekly planning meetings (e.g., Thursdays).
• Invite your team into the planner (user view) and discuss who's working on what.
• Use checklists and filters to quickly find tasks or capacity.
• For spontaneous changes:
  • Create an absence (e.g., for illness).
  • Check your other team members' availability.
  • Replan tasks or use multi-select plus AI support.

Typical scenarios:

• New project: Who has free capacity? Find out with the availability filter.
• Client request: Quickly check who has time and assign tasks right away.
• Team bottlenecks: Mark tasks with priority, comment, and move them around.

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And Now? Let's Go! 🎉

Start with your first planning meeting, roughly reserve capacity, or assign concrete tasks. No matter how you begin: with the awork planner it'll be structured, flexible, and definitely not boring.