--- title: How to plan what goes out and when url: https://tideswell.xyz/docs/projects/plan-what-goes-out description: Lay out planned items on a project's date spine, then promote one into a real task with its sub-tasks. --- > Documentation index: fetch https://tideswell.xyz/llms.txt to discover every page before exploring further. # 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 if you have no project yet. ## Before you start [#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 , so what this page calls a planned item will read as your own word on screen. ## Why plan separately from tasks? [#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? [#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 is the spine laid out? [#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? [#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 . 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? [#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? [#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 . 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.