Perhaps I’m missing something here (partially because I jumped to the bottom after reading a hundred posts or so of the same thing), but is nobody attempting to handle this via Subitems for their time tracking? That’s how we’re doing it now and it works just fine. It requires a little bit of tweaking to get proper roll up of the hours and such, but it’s definitely possible when combined with the Workload widget.
I’ll put down the use case we currently use, and hopefully that will work well enough for others.
Board covering Planned Tasks
- Each Item = 1 Task
- Each Subitem = 1 Employee
- Each Subitem has whatever filtering fields needed, but then also a Time Tracking Field, a timline field, and a formula field to convert the time tracking result to a decimal value in hours (since attempting to read the results in the workload widget seems to roll it up in seconds for some reason),
- Formula column by the way is: “ROUND(divide(ABS({Time Tracking}),3600),2)”
- Items have a mirror column to roll up the Total Hours from the Fomula column (for visibility from the item itself, can also have a roll up of the People column too, to show who was on the task)
- Then add a ‘blank’ View (formerly Dashboard), and add the Workload widget.
- Set this up so that the Time Column is based on the timeline column, resource type is the people column, Effort and Capacity are the formula Total Hours column, and hen any additional weekly capacity or group based settings that you want.
- alternatively, you can have a single dashboard that rolls up the data of multiple boards in this way instead, so that you can get time across multiple boards.
Then you have each person who is working on a task create their own subitem, update the fields accordingly, and then track their time accordingly. This includes setting the Timeline column as well, for the period of time that they will be working on the task, that week (this factors into the workload widget as a part of the special tweaks required).
- It’s possible to have the timeline cover multiple weeks, but it won’t necessarily be accurate during that time if that is the case, as it evenly distributes hours tracked across all weeks in the timeline, even if only a fraction of the time was spent in one of those weeks.
- Two workarounds for this are to have each subitem account for either one week or one day’s worth of time on the task. i.e. Working on a task for two weeks, would involve creating a subitem for the first week, and then a second one for the second week under the same item. Then all hours track appropriately when viewed in the workload view.
Special Extra Recommendation: Don’t have people name the subitems after themselves. Have them essentially copy/paste the name of the item again. In this way, if they look at their ‘My work’ section in Monday, they don’t see themselves assigned to a hundred tasks with just their name on them, but instead what the actual tasks are.
Edit: adding a screenshot as well, of a small subset selection of tasks/people over the last few weeks:
