Stop your resource chaos: 3 ways to create resource calendars to manage projects & teams

When we first ran our Global Agency Productivity Report a few years ago, 74% of agency team members declared themselves overbooked on projects at least once a month, and 26% said it happened 5 or more times per month.

I don’t know where YOU fall on that line in 2025; personally, I’m somewhere in between. But working at Float and talking to thousands of customers who use our software to plan and allocate time better, I have come to the conclusion that <highlight>there are many unsung heroes of keeping your team healthy and productive and avoiding resourcing chaos</highlight>—and one of them is the humble resource calendar.

A resource calendar makes it easy to organize both project resources and project timelines, answer questions like Can we take on this project? and Do we have the team for the job?, and make sure everybody can complete their work on time, on budget, and with relatively little drama.

Like this:

(that ’s Float, btw ↑) 

What is a resource calendar?

A resource calendar is a tool used to plan and manage resources effectively during a project.

Resource calendars help resource and project managers visualize what tasks a team member is working on and when. They can also go one step further and break those tasks down by the time and day a team member is tackling them, so team leaders and stakeholders have an accurate overview of what everyone is working on, when.

Among other things, a resource calendar will break down:

• Overall availability
• Working days and working hours
• Vacation time
• Public holidays and other non-working days
• Leaves of absence
• Start/end dates for different project milestones

When a PM or resource manager has this information on hand, it’s much easier for them to make decisions about projects that come into the pipeline.

How can a resource calendar be used in project management?

Let’s use a practical example from Dovetail Games, a developer and publisher based in Kent (UK). They had a relatively small team of around 20 people working on various projects at any given time; and while they initially organized their project calendars in Microsoft Excel, they eventually realized they couldn’t manage their projects with enough flexibility using a spreadsheet alone.

What they (and other project teams in similar situations) needed: 

• A way to better visualize available resources
• The ability to quickly block out time if a client asked for an additional feature or upgrade to a project
• The ability for project managers and project teams to communicate and add notes to tasks while working on them
• A flexible way to plan for team PTO, national holidays off, and sick leave, and ensure the right amount of coverage

None of that happens easily in a spreadsheet. It was at this point that assistant Development Manager Ioannis Archontakis turned to Float, which specializes in resource management and therefore could give his team a dynamic, real-time resource calendar. In his words: “We used to get by using Excel; then we invested in Float, and it has taken the company’s project planning to the next level.”

The entire project team can now see precisely when projects and tasks are due; plus, Float’s reporting analytics paint a clear picture of project progress, and whether or not they are staying on budget. Detailed capacity reports break down each team member’s capacity and their scheduled billable hours, as well as every project in the team’s pipeline.

This detailed breakdown makes it easy for the team to plan ahead and resource projects as soon as they roll in.

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3 ways to create a resource calendar

There are several ways you can plot your resources and allocate tasks on a calendar and, as is often the case, the ‘right’ one for you depends on factors like team size, budget, and specific business needs. An Excel spreadsheet or Google Calendar may be fine for a smaller-size org; growing companies with 10+ will likely choose to invest in specialized software that is more robust and can offer additional functionality (like tracking capacity or budgeting projects).

1. Invest in dedicated resource calendar software

Dedicated resource management software gives you the tools you need to organize your team’s calendar quickly and accurately. It offers a platform to create simple, collaborative calendars that are easier to work with than Excel or Google Sheets, are updated in real time, and are unlikely to break when someone accidentally clicks a cell they were not supposed to click.

This is what Float is all about. With Float, you can: 

• Create new projects and schedule tasks on your team members’ calendars so they know what they should be working on and when
• Assign and update tasks as soon as a project enters your pipeline
• Manage time off and team capacity
• Mark your team’s skills and other identifying info (eg their location) with people tags to keep track of everyone
• Keep everyone on the same page with a live activity feed and notifications sent through email, Slack, or mobile push notifications via the Float mobile app

Whenever a new project enters your pipeline, you can pull up your calendar in Float to investigate resource availability and determine how many people could work on it. If your team has enough capacity, you can start assigning tasks by adding them straight to their calendars. You can even mark task dependencies (the arrow visualized below): 

Plus, your team gets a daily or weekly email with their complete project schedule, outlining the assigned tasks they should be working on.

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2. Create a resource calendar in a spreadsheet

Depending on your scheduling needs, you might be able to build a basic resource calendar using just a spreadsheet.

Excel and Google Sheets both have pre-built templates to build out a resource calendar quickly. Here’s what a Google Sheets template looks like for planning phases for a major project:

The good news about using a spreadsheet to create a resource calendar is that it’s easy to edit and share with the rest of your team. The bad news is pretty much everything else. Not only do you have to schedule everything manually, but the more people the spreadsheet is shared with, the more difficult it is to manage. And of course, we’ve all had that one spreadsheet that took ages to put together, then someone else came in and a few accidental clicks later, bang!, instant data doom.

Nick Lépine of Dynamo used to meet with his team weekly to devise a plan for the following week’s assignments. He found it helpful to allocate the team’s tasks across am and pm slots for the week using a spreadsheet.

“We came up with our own time blocking system, which has been working quite well so far: we work with 2 blocks per day. A block of 3.5 hours in the morning, and another block of 3.5 hours in the afternoon. This means we allocate 10 blocks per team member on a regular week,” Lépine told us when we asked about the spreadsheet above.

Although Lépine says organizing the team this way “did the trick,” it also left people feeling squeezed because of the lack of flexibility. They decided to ditch their spreadsheets for resource calendar software that showed who was working on what in clear time blocks.

Their tool of choice? You know where this is going 😉  

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3. Use Google Calendar to build a resource calendar

Finally, you can use Google Calendar to create a resource calendar and assign separate tasks and deadlines to both yourself and the rest of your team. Because the calendar is connected to Gmail, it’s pretty easy to integrate apps like Zoom and Google Meets and add meeting blocks or recurring events automatically.

There is a pretty giant BUT, though. The issue that PMs and resource managers will run into with an app like Google Calendar is that if everyone has separate resource calendars (often with different work schedules), it’s practically impossible to get a truly accurate overview of who has space on their schedule to take on more assignments.

And yes, sure: you could set weekly alerts to remind your team to update their calendar to reflect their schedule, holidays, etc., and you could also hold weekly meetings to sync up your calendars and see how everyone’s workload is trending for the following week. But all of this sounds to me like a lot of work about work.

‍Pro tip: there’s a potentially easier option here for teams keen on sticking with Google (or even Outlook—same concept, different name): using a resource scheduling software like Float that includes a 2-way sync option. This is how I use Float: I have a bunch of recurring tasks and calls in my Google calendar...

...that I send straight to my Schedule in Float, where they show up as the purple resource allocations you see below. From there, I can add all other project tasks directly into the Float schedule.

Bonus point: the tool keeps track of resource utilization in both hours and percentages (the blue arrow below), so it’s very easy to get an at-a-glance sense of how (over)booked or available your resources are across future weeks, months, or quarters.  

To sum up: using a resource calendar just makes sense

A resource calendar helps everyone stay on the same page and serves as the single source of truth when it comes to your team’s availability, capacity, and workload.

A simple calendar or a basic spreadsheet may be enough for some—but most teams are better off using dedicated tools like Float that make managing your team’s capacity easier and also help simplify your project workflow.

The more accurate your resource calendar is, the happier and healthier your team and business will be in the long run.

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