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Plans: timelines for your rooms

Turn a room into a plan to schedule its desks on a timeline. See every plan's progress, finish date and warnings on the Plans page, and open one to plan it.

All plansUpdated

A plan is a room with a schedule. Make any room a plan and its desks, and the tasks filed on them, become the plan's tasks: you can lay them out on a timeline, link the ones that depend on each other, mark milestones and see what is running late. The Plans page lists every plan with its progress and finish date, so you can see at a glance which ones need you.

Nothing in a plan is a copy. A task in a plan is the same task you see on its desk and in All Tasks, and the schedule is worked out from the real dates, lengths and links you give it.

Before you start

  • Plans are available on every plan.
  • What counts as a plan's tasks: every desk inside the plan's room, including desks in rooms inside it, and every task filed on those desks. Archived desks and desks in Trash are left out.
  • A plan shows on the Plans page once it has at least one task. A plan you have just created opens straight away so you can add its first task.

Open the Plans page

Any of these opens it:

Make a plan

Turn an existing room into a plan

  1. Open All rooms.
  2. Point at the room's card and click Make this a plan, or right-click the card and choose Make this a plan.
  3. The card now says Plan, and the room joins the Plans page (once it has a desk in it).

See Create and organise rooms.

Start a new plan

  1. On the Plans page, click New plan at the top right. You can also press ⌘ K (Ctrl K on Windows) and choose New plan from anywhere.
  2. PlexiDesk creates a plan called New plan and opens it.
  3. Click Add task, type the first task's title and press Enter. Each task you add here is created as a desk in the plan's room.

To rename the plan, go to All rooms, right-click its card and choose Rename room.

What the Plans page shows

The page is titled Plans. Along the top, four totals cover all your plans:

Total What it counts
Plans How many plans you have.
Tasks done Finished tasks out of all the tasks in all your plans, such as 14/40.
Avg complete The average of each plan's percentage complete.
At risk How many plans carry a Drift or Cycle warning.

Under the totals is a card for each plan, in alphabetical order. Each card shows:

  • The plan's name.
  • Drift, in amber, when a task finished later than planned and is now pushing later work back. See Baselines, working days, levelling and export.
  • Cycle, in red, when tasks depend on each other in a loop, so the plan cannot be scheduled properly. See Edit a plan task and its dependencies.
  • How many tasks are done out of the total, with the percentage and a progress bar.
  • Finishes and the date the plan's last task is scheduled to end.

A plan's percentage is the share of its tasks that are finished. The Progress you set on a task's details does not change it.

If you have no plans yet, the page says No plans yet.

Open a plan

  1. Click the plan's card.
  2. The plan opens on its Overview. The buttons at the top switch between Overview, Timeline, Board, Grid, Calendar, Workload and Files. See Plan views: Overview, Board, Grid, Calendar, Workload and Files.
  3. To go back to all your plans, click Plans at the top left.

Make a plan an ordinary room again

  1. Open All rooms.
  2. Point at the plan's card and click Remove from Plans, or right-click the card and choose it.

The room leaves the Plans page. Its desks and their tasks stay where they are, with their due dates and other details.

Good ways to use plans

  • A client project. Keep one room per client project, make it a plan, and give each desk a planned finish. The timeline shows the order of work, and the critical path shows what cannot slip.
  • A launch. Mark the launch day and key reviews as milestones, link the work that leads up to them, and check Running late on the Overview each morning.
  • A weekly check. Look at the At risk total on the Plans page and open any plan with a Drift or Cycle warning.

Common questions

My plan is not on the Plans page

A plan appears once it has at least one task that is not archived or in Trash. Open the room, add a desk, and the plan appears. A plan that is archived, or in Trash, is not listed either.

I opened the plan from All rooms and did not see a timeline

Opening a plan from All rooms opens its dashboard page. The timeline and the other planning views are on the Plans page: open Plans and click the plan's card.

Does making a room a plan change its desks?

No. The desks stay in the room and work as before. The plan adds a schedule on top of them.

How do I delete a plan?

A plan is a room, so delete it the way you delete a room: in All rooms, right-click its card and choose Move to Trash. Its desks go with it. See Archive, trash and restore rooms and desks.

Still need help? Contact support at [email protected].