Best practice for managing standing tasks

We use the Everhour integration with Asana to track our teams time. This results in us creating tasks that are “rolling” in the sense that there is not necessarily a completion date. For example, team meetings, time spent checking email, professional development.

When using the Portfolios feature I notice that many of our tasks are “unscheduled” as they do not have due dates assigned (likely resultant of the fact that the task is “rolling”). There are a few things we could do here (e.g. set an arbitrary due date for a given task, create re-occurring tasks) but this might not capture workload as accurately as I might like since dates will be arbitrary and I think employees might ignore re-occurring tasks.

Another concern I have with our use of Workload and capacity is that we do not create specific tasks for planning related to tasks or milestones, but add the time spent here in the Everhour application (for example, a task may represent a specific meeting and the due date applied to that task is equal to when that meeting will occur, but there is still time spent planning for that meeting that may not be accounted for in a separate task or subtask). Thus, the calculation of workload is underestimated for that particular task, and capacity overestimated.

How do people handle planning and coordinating work that is associated with a task. Do you indicate those out as subtasks? Overall, I would just say I spent X amount of time planning for Y meeting, and then enter that amount of time into the everhour integration and mark the task complete when it is completed.

Do you educate folks to set due dates in a particular way? How do you handle tasks that are standing and may never get “completed”?

As a project manager, I know what my team’s capacity is based on our 1:1 weekly meetings and having in-depth knowledge of their project work. That is not true for my boss, and I would like to visualize this information in Portfolios for him and other members of my team as accurately as possible.

When you talk about Portfolio, you actually mean workload correct? You use Everhour but would like Workload to also display correct information right?

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Hi, Yes that is correct. I haven’t revisited this topic with my team yet (or have had any time to think about it given capacity constraints related to the pandemic). Overall I think we are changing some of the ways we are handling our work and I am training-up a new PM to assist with this.

Hy @Ashley_Stauffer,

I use EverHour too with Asana.

For logging time on marginal activities, like responding to emails or just updating the project and the next meetings, I have a Project management task on top of my projects and I log time in it. This task is always active, never completed until the entire project is archived.

For scheduled meetings I prefer to have dedicated tasks with the date of the meeting and the agenda. I use a tag that indicates if it’s online or on site in order to bill the customer correctly, EverHour can filter by tag. Usually I log the time used for planning that meeting and for sending the final note.