How to Get Started with Project Planning

Toggl Plan is a project planner designed to give you the best overview of what your team is up to and where your projects are heading.

Here are the basic steps to get going with project planning.

First, Create a Project

To create a new Project, click on the '+' sign on the sidebar next to Projects section. 

Name your Project, choose a color of your liking (click on the colored circle next to Project name) and make sure your boards and timeline toggles are active. You can also add a Client - it can be an actual client you’re working for, or some other meaningful way to group your projects. Clients are here to help you better organize your sidebar.

You can also add project start and end dates and a project estimate. The latter signifies the total time estimate for the entire project, in hours. This will be taken into account under Project Overview, and it helps to keep an eye on the initial estimation, comparing it against task estimations that get added and updated as project progresses. Project start and end dates help contain the tasks in both estimated vs actuals and task progress.

If you are also using Toggl Track and have the integration enabled, we will sync project estimations between the tools. In that case, be sure to disable the option to calculate project estimation based on task estimations. In the current version, the sync of task estimations (and the totals) is not supported.

Add Tasks to Boards

Add everything you need to get done to the boards. Prioritise them by dragging and dropping the tasks to another column, to clearly communicate the state and urgency of what needs to get done.

By adding start and end dates to the tasks on your list, you will also be able to see those dates on a project timeline. Add new ones straight on the timeline, or rearrange the existing ones to better reflect the reality. 

Alternatively, use Taskbox to easily schedule tasks from boards to timeline.

You can also add tasks straight to your timelines. To add a task to your timeline, simply click and drag to create a colourful block of the length of your choosing. This block marks the dates you have chosen for the task to occur on.

Congratulations, you've successfully created your first Project plan in Toggl Plan!

Now, learn how to use segments and tags to organize your projects better.

What Next?

1. Invite more users to your Toggl Plan workspace and assign tasks to everyone. Click on the User settings shortcut on the sidebar at the left side of the screen. 
2. Create a joint Team timeline for everyone to easily get an overview of what they need to get done. Keep an eye on workloads, make sure no one is overbooked and identify where there's room to take on new projects.