How hour allocation works

Every hour on a schedule lane has one of three sources. By default, the item’s estimate is spread evenly over the working days in the item’s span. When someone types hours into the item’s cells, those hours replace the spread for that person.

Reserved hours, such as a support rotation, add to the day on top of both.

The strip above each lane adds all three into one number per column. On a person’s or a team’s lane, that number is what the view compares with the lane’s capacity.

Automatic hours follow the estimate

The estimate is spread over the person’s working days between the start date and the end date. A working day is a day on which the person has capacity. If no day in the span has capacity, the hours are spread over every calendar day in it.
An item with several assignees appears in each assignee’s lane, and the hours are split evenly between them.
When a person takes a day off, automatic hours move to that person’s other working days inside the span by themselves.
An item with no estimate draws a ghost bar, a dashed outline that holds no hours until someone types hours into its cells.

Typing hours sets them by hand

Each item row has one cell for every column the item’s span covers, for a viewer who may edit the item and create allocations. A number typed into a cell states how many hours that day or period holds. One cell edit does all of this:

That person’s hours for the item become hours set by hand. The first edit keeps every other day as it was, so nothing else moves on screen.
Every other assignee’s hours are fixed at their current values.
The item’s estimate is rewritten to the sum of the hours on all its lanes, when the view maps an estimate field.
One undo reverses all of it.

Week and month cells

A total typed into a week or month cell keeps the pattern inside that period. Typing 0 clears that cell’s whole period.

Clearing every day is refused, because that is the job of Reset to auto. Only columns inside the item’s span have cells, so to add hours outside the span, make the bar longer.

How a hand-set bar behaves

A thin line along the top edge of the bar marks hours set by hand. Hand-set hours are never split between assignees.

Moving the bar moves the hours with it. Resizing the bar rescales the hours to the new span and keeps the total.

For a bar that has hours, the right-click menu holds curve presets such as Front-loaded and Ramp up. Reset to auto returns the bar to the automatic spread.

Time off never deletes hand-set hours

When time off lands on a day with hand-set hours, the hours stay and a warning marker appears on that segment. Reflow around time off, in the bar’s right-click menu, moves those hours onto the person’s available days between the first and last segment. Each available day takes a share in proportion to what it already carries. The reflow never runs by itself.

Reserved hours

A reservation holds a person’s time for work that is not a task. Examples are a support rotation, or capacity promised to a project before its tasks exist. Reservations sit in one extra row under the lane’s items, have their own dates, and are already inside the strip and the totals.

What the totals count

A strip cell counts every hour in that lane for that column: automatic, hand-set and reserved.
The lane header shows the lane’s total for the page on screen.
The footer row adds up, per column, everything the filter and search leave visible, reserved hours included. Under team sections a person is counted once, so section totals need not add up to the footer. Its left cell shows the page total and a count of unscheduled items.
Items with no dates add nothing and wait in the Unscheduled subsection. An item with no estimate adds nothing until hours are typed into its cells.

Hovering a strip cell lists what makes up its number, largest first.

A worked example

An item estimated at 12 hours runs from Monday to Wednesday. It is assigned to Ana and Ben, who both work all three days.

The estimate spreads to 4 hours per day, so each lane shows 2 hours per day. Ana types 5 into her Monday cell. Her hours become 9, Ben keeps his 6, and the estimate becomes 15.

Lane	Monday	Tuesday	Wednesday	Total
Ana, before	2	2	2	6
Ana, after	5	2	2	9
Ben, after	2	2	2	6

Behaviours that surprise people

Editing the estimate does not reach hand-set hours. After one cell edit every assignee’s hours are set by hand, so a later estimate change moves no bar. The estimate then disagrees with the bars until the next cell edit rewrites it.
A failed save can leave the estimate too high. The next cell edit recomputes it from the hours that exist.
The warning marker is not drawn at month zoom, because a month column cannot point at one day.
Cells appear only on the lane of a person or a team. Hours assigned to a team stay on the team’s lane and are never spread over its members.
On a phone or in very narrow columns, hours are edited in the item’s detail panel instead of the cell.
A view can be set to spread the remaining hours instead, the estimate minus tracked time, from today onward. An overdue item’s remaining hours then land on today.