How to plan what goes out and when

Below the cards on a project's Overview is a vertical date spine, where you plan what goes out and when before any of it is work. When a plan is ready to start, you promote it and it becomes a real task with its sub-tasks already filled in. Start at How to start a project if you have no project yet.

Before you start

Adding and editing plans is open to every member by default, and you can always edit your own. Promoting a plan into a task, and deleting somebody else's plan, is usually a lead's job.

Each team names this thing itself. One department calls a plan an Editorial, another a Prep, another a Visit. The word you see comes from that team's setting, described in How to set up departments, so what this page calls a planned item will read as your own word on screen.

Why plan separately from tasks?

Because a plan is a decision about what and when, and a task is a job with an owner. Turning every idea into a task immediately fills somebody's list with work that has not been agreed.

Fairgreen plans the Autumn drop as fifteen entries on a spine: two lookbook posts, four emails, a launch video, a set of store visits. Most weeks, half of them move.

Moving a plan is dragging it to another day. Moving fifteen tasks with assignees and dates is an afternoon.

How do you add a plan?

Hover the spine on the day you want and use the +, or hover any day on the project's Calendar tab and use the + there.

Each entry has a title, an optional write-up, a target date and one or more sub-task type tags. Those tags are what become sub-tasks when the plan is promoted.

The tags on offer are the ones an admin has given to this project's department. A department with none assigned gets an empty picker, which is a settings job rather than a fault. See How to set up the kinds of work your team does.

How is the spine laid out?

Entries group into Upcoming, Unscheduled and Past, with past collapsed behind a count so it does not dominate.

The toggle at the top switches between With items and All days, and it remembers your choice. All days is the one to use when you are looking for gaps rather than reading what is already there.

Drag an entry to another day to move it, or drop it on Unscheduled to take the date off.

A long write-up collapses behind Show more.

How do you turn a plan into work?

Press Promote. A dialog opens with the plan's title and write-up already in it, where you set the task's status, assignee, priority and due date exactly as you would for any task.

Underneath, one sub-task row appears per type tag, pre-filled from that department's templates. Each row can be renamed, given its own assignee, priority and date, or unticked so it is not created.

You can add custom sub-task rows too, up to twenty in total.

If the promoted task should repeat, turn that on here as well, per How to make a task repeat.

Promote once. After that the button is gone, and the plan carries a chip linking to the task it became. If the task is later archived, the chip shows it struck through and marked archived rather than going quiet.

What happens to the plan afterwards?

It stays on the Overview with its link to the task. It drops off the project Calendar, because the task it became is already on the grid and showing both would double it.

How do you get a document created automatically?

Turn on Create a document when promoted to a task on the entry. When you promote it, a linked document is created alongside the task.

This is how a blog post or a shoot brief arrives with somewhere to write it, rather than somebody making a document by hand and hoping it gets linked. See What are documents?.

If the document cannot be created for any reason, the task is still created and you add the document yourself. The work is never blocked on the write-up.