Workload Calculation

Workload calculation in awork is the most accurate calculation you can currently find in a work management tool, since it takes your planning, project management, and calendars into account. 🙌

Sure, there are always special cases and edge cases that aren't covered yet, but we're actively working on improving the planning step by step.

🔐 Workload calculation is available starting with the Standard plan.

The 10 Principles of Workload Calculation

1. Future Only

The workload view only looks at today and the future.

The past cannot be represented through completed tasks and projects or by pushing remaining planned effort into the future.

2. Nested Planning Levels

There are two planning levels:

• Tasks and bookings in the timeline (rough)
• Tasks in the calendar (detailed)

These planning levels are nested and work great together without causing double counting.

This means concretely: if a user is assigned 6 hours to a task and that task is entered for 3 hours in the calendar, only 6 hours total will be recorded in the workload.

3. Calendar Always Counts

Everything in your calendar (appointments and tasks in the calendar) is directly counted as workload.

4. Even Distribution

The planned effort from bookings and tasks is distributed evenly across the available days within their time range.

When available capacity varies on different weekdays, the even distribution adjusts proportionally accordingly.

Tasks in the calendar only affect the day they start on (start time).

Tasks without a time range (start and end time) have no direct impact on the workload.

5. Workload Doesn't Reduce Automatically (Tasks)

The workload from tasks (not bookings!) is pushed into the future when the start and end dates are around today. The planned effort doesn't disappear just because time passes (see the following points).

For bookings, however, this doesn't apply. They remain on the days even if those days are in the past.

6. Time Tracking Gets Deducted

To accurately show the progress of a task, the evenly distributed workload is reduced by the tracked time. To avoid double deduction through tasks that might exist in the calendar (which are also deducted), calendar entries from the past are ignored and only the actual tracked time is deducted.

If no time is tracked on a task, calendar entries always flow into the workload calculation.

7. Completed Tasks and Projects

Completed projects set the workload from tasks and bookings to 0. The same applies to completed tasks. Their impact on the workload is also always 0. Projects that haven't started yet and their tasks, however, do count (since it makes sense to include them in planning already).

8. Planned Effort is Distributed Evenly Across Assignees

When multiple users are assigned to a task, the remaining workload (after tasks in the calendar, tracked time, etc. have already been deducted) is distributed evenly among all of them.

9. Absences Reduce Available Days

An absence removes available work days (only full days). These days are skipped when distributing the planned effort from projects and tasks, similar to weekends. However, appointments and tasks in the calendar that fall on absent days are still shown as workload allocation on those days.

Half-day absences reduce the workload on that day by half.

You can learn more about absences here.

10. Overlapping Calendar Entries Aren't Counted Twice

When multiple appointments and/or tasks in the calendar overlap, meaning their times intersect, only the hours covered on that day are counted as workload.