Team load and capacity: what a fair week looks like

Load is a level, throughput is a rate

Two numbers describe a person's week and they must not be added together. Load is how much open work they are holding right now, in minutes. Throughput is how many tasks they finished over the window you are looking at. One is a level, the other is a rate, and the load tab in analytics keeps them in separate columns for that reason.

A person with a high load and a high throughput is busy and moving. A person with a high load and a low throughput is stuck, and that is the row to look at first on Monday. Reading only one of the two numbers hides the difference.

How a task's minutes are counted

Every task can carry an estimate in minutes. The templates ship with estimates on the larger tasks, for example 480 minutes for writing a script and shot list in the commercial pack and 960 for the offline edit, and you edit them like any other field.

When a task has one assignee, its full estimate is that person's load. When it has several, the estimate is split evenly between them and any remainder minute goes to the first assignees in order, so the shares always add back up to the estimate. A task with no estimate, or no assignee, contributes nothing to anyone's load. That is a choice: an unestimated task is invisible to the workload view until someone puts a number on it, which is the honest place for the gap to show.

The same arithmetic is used by the workload view on a board and by the daily analytics rollup, so the bar a producer sees on Tuesday and the member row in the analytics tab describe the same minutes.

Capacity: the default and teams

A person who belongs to no team has a capacity of 2,400 minutes a week, which is five days of eight hours. An organisation that never creates a team sees exactly that for everyone.

A team is a name, a list of people and one weekly capacity in minutes. It carries nothing else: no workflow, no roles, no notification rules. A person on one team takes that team's capacity. A person on two teams takes the sum of both, which is how you represent someone who works part of the week in post-production and part in the studio.

Team management is in train at the time of writing, on its way to production. The workload view already reads team capacity when teams exist and falls back to the default when they do not.

The workload view on a board

Workload is one of the saved view types, alongside board, list, table, timeline and calendar. It draws one bar per assignee: open minutes as a share of that person's capacity. The bar is clamped at 100 percent, so someone at 130 percent fills the bar and is painted red rather than spilling out of the box.

Unassigned work has its own row at the bottom, so the view also shows how many minutes are not yet on anyone's plate. Moving a task between people changes the bars immediately, because the view reads the board rather than a snapshot.

The load tab in analytics

The load tab reads the daily rollup rather than the live board and shows, per member, the latest workload level, open count, overdue count, completed count over the window and how many days were measured. Members are sorted by workload, heaviest first.

The three busiest people from this tab also appear in the Monday owner report, with their workload in minutes, so an overloaded week is visible even to someone who never opens the analytics screen.

What a fair week looks like in practice

A fair week is not an equal week. A senior editor with a 2,400-minute capacity and 2,300 minutes of open work is at 96 percent; a part-time colorist on a 1,200-minute team at 1,300 minutes is at 108 percent and is the one to help. The view shows the ratio, not the raw minutes, for exactly this reason.

The lever is the estimate. If the bars look wrong, the estimates are wrong before the assignments are. Fix the numbers on the three or four largest tasks and the picture usually corrects itself.

• Look at load and throughput together; high load with low throughput is the stuck row.
• Put estimates on the big tasks first; an unestimated task weighs nothing.
• Set team capacity for part-timers so the ratio is honest.
• Watch the unassigned row: minutes nobody owns are the week's hidden load.

Questions that keep coming up

What counts as a person's load?

The estimated minutes of their open tasks. A task with several assignees is split evenly; a task without an estimate contributes nothing.

What is the default weekly capacity?

2,400 minutes, which is five days of eight hours. A person on one or more teams takes the sum of those teams' capacities instead.

Does the workload view track time actually spent?

No. It compares estimated open minutes against capacity. Tasked does not record time spent on a task.

Where does the workload number in the weekly report come from?

From the same daily rollup the load tab reads. The report lists the three busiest members with their workload in minutes.

Can one person be on two teams?

Yes. Their capacity is the sum of both teams' weekly capacities.