It's time to get familiar with your Schedule in Float—the starting point for planning your projects in the most effective way!
In this guide, we'll show you how to navigate your schedule and start allocating project work based on your team's real capacity. You'll also see how to plan and track your projects with ease, as well as use data to optimize how your team's time is spent.
Ready? Let's get started!
You'll learn to:
✔️ Read your Schedule at a glance
✔️ Set and track your team's real capacity
✔️ Plan and monitor projects with ease
✔️ Leverage your data to optimize how work is allocated
1. Get to know your Schedule
Your Schedule tells you if and when your team has the capacity to complete project work—before you even begin creating task lists in your project management tool. In the Schedule view, you'll be able to plan projects on a high level first to make sure work is allocated and tracked in the most effective way.
Let's get familiar with the Schedule!
1.1. Customize your Schedule view
There are many ways to read your schedule with the flexibility to filter across any combination of fields like time off, employee type, and department. This will help you get the most relevant information quickly when you need it, such as what a particular department is working on or who's on a well-earned leave. 🏖️
To do ⚡
✅ Apply filters like tags, people, and departments, and use the star icon to save your preferred view
✅ Set your preferred timeline view: daily, weekly, or monthly
✅ Choose a density option: compact, comfortable, or spacious view
✅ Share the schedule if you need to via email, sharing a link, or exporting to CSV
⭐ Coming soon: Saved views
You'll soon be able to save your favorite filters as "views." This is especially useful for teams within teams using Float. Teams on the Pro plan will also have the option to make Views shareable to specified team members and departments.
1.2. Learn to read your Schedule
The Schedule is color-coded to indicate blocked and available time, as well as whether tasks are confirmed or tentative. These visual indicators make it easier for you to know capacity and progress at a glance.
<tip>
Color codes for reading your Schedule
- White space represents available time for scheduling work.
- Diagonal lines represent all non-working time. There are different colors for different types of time off.
- Red space represents overallocation, meaning a team member is overbooked or working overtime.
</tip>
There are three different types of work that can easily be differentiated in the Schedule:
Confirmed work = Solid color.
Completed work = Checkmark on the upper right-hand corner.
Tentative work = Outline only.
Your team can also use custom statuses within their Schedule, indicated by a small triangle at the bottom right corner. This is so they can let the team know what they're up to on any given day—maybe Tina is working from the London office after the holiday break and Matias is traveling to an out-of-town conference next Wednesday. Statuses are fully customizable from team settings.
2. Streamline everyone’s capacity
You'll want your Schedule to represent the most accurate view of your team's work hours and time off at any given time. This will ensure you allocate work based on real capacity. Tip: if you haven't yet set your team's default working days and hours, now's the time!
We'll walk you through how you can streamline capacity management in Float.
2.1. Customize your team's individual capacity
Modify default working hours for specific team members via their individual profiles in the Schedule. Select whether an employee is full-time or part-time and set their individual work days and hours.
Make sure time off is clearly laid out in the Schedule to be able to see real capacity when allocating work. Import everyone's regional holidays in team settings, to make sure they don't appear available on these days in the Schedule. Also, let your team know that they can send time off requests via Float easily, by logging them in their Schedule.
Time off requests go to People Managers (team members' supervisors) for approval—you can turn this approval workflow off from the team settings if you want all time off to appear immediately confirmed in the Schedule.
Time off allocations will then signal that no project work should be added at those times.
To do ⚡
✅ Update the individual work hours for any non-full-time team members
✅ Import everyone's public holidays in the Schedule based on their region
✅ Let your team know to start requesting or scheduling their time off in Float
<tip>
Pro tip: Get people managers to set up their team
Invite people managers to Float so they can add their team and start managing their availability. Involving your team early on makes onboarding more collaborative and helps develop healthy habits for Float to be your team's source of truth for capacity.
</tip>
2.2. Allocate project work
Now it's time to allocate work via the Schedule. By focusing on time allocations, before getting in the weeds of specific tasks in your project management tool, you can understand your team's planned time better and create more effective high-level plans.
For example, allocate time for a specific project so that a team member knows they'll be working on that for the next two weeks—even if the details of the tasks haven't been ironed out yet. Check when your team has scheduled time off to prevent allocating work when they're already booked on vacay! 🌴
To do ⚡
✅ Allocate time for upcoming project work
✅ Align on the ideal team utilization rate
<tip>
Pro tip
When rolling out Float, it's important to be aligned on what your team's target utilization rate is. A common benchmark is to allocate work for 80% of the team's planned work hours and leave 20% unscheduled for ad hoc project tasks or emergencies. Other teams may find it useful to schedule that 20% as general work to cover anything unexpected, so it'll still appear in the Schedule.
Whatever your approach, make sure to align about this with stakeholders and communicate it well.
</tip>
3. Get familiar with the project plan
The project plan shows you a Gantt-style view of your team's projects, re-organizing your Schedule information to enable easier planning. Here, it's easy to see key details for each project such as which team members are assigned to it, the remaining budget, or what work allocations have already been created.
It's also useful to add project phases and milestones to break projects into more manageable chunks of time. We know plans change all the time, so it's easy to make adjustments, such as shift timelines, archive projects, split allocations, and re-assign people.
To do ⚡
✅ Add milestones within new or existing projects
✅ Create project phases
✅ Modify allocations or projects via the edit menu
✅ Link related allocations to create dependencies
4. Visualize your capacity data on the Schedule
Data is at the heart of optimizing how your team spends their time at work. In Float, you have access to real-time analytics to help you better understand workload and how you can allocate it to create happier and more productive teams.
All you need to do is click and drag over a specified date range to see quick analytics for that date. It's easy then to sort by relevant filters such as unscheduled time or department if you want to figure out who can take on work and when.
For example, let's say you need a designer for a last-minute project next week. By selecting that date range, you may see that one of your designers is fully booked, while another has six hours unscheduled—aka, they have the capacity to take on this project.
To do ⚡
✅ Use "the loop" on your Schedule to see allocated hours for that period
✅ Sort your schedule by ‘Unscheduled High-low’ to see who’s available
Ready to schedule success?
Well done, you're well on your way to becoming a scheduling pro! Your Schedule in Float will soon be the source of truth for team capacity and your go-to place for assigning work—making it a breeze to plan ahead for your projects and people.
