New to scheduling

You have a job to plan and no scheduling background. Good. Here is the whole job, start to finish, in five stops.

First stop: start. A schedule needs a name, a rule book, a start date and a working week. Open your folder, then Files, New schedule. The schedule lands in the folder you are in.

Name it, pick the Standard rules, and say when work starts. 5-day 8-hour is an office week. Leave More settings for later, except Opens in Simple. New schedule and your defaults has the rest.

Create, and it opens empty, asking for a list. Type one, or paste it from Word or Excel. Second stop: build. Write the work down as you would on a notepad, with how long each piece takes.

One line on the card earns a click first: Show the After column. Links by name live there. One activity per line, its length after the name, two spaces to group. See Adding and deleting activities.

There is the sheet: name, dates, After, duration, percent done, assigned to. The bars draw themselves. No length means one day. Type 2w, and it is ten working days. See Durations and the sheet.

Third stop: link them. Nothing on site happens in a vacuum, and the schedule should know what waits for what. In the After column, type what must finish first, by name. See Links by name.

A link means this starts when that one finishes. Type the rest the same way, and Auto reschedules. Float is how far an activity can slip before anything after it minds.

Spend it, and nothing else moves. The bar slides; the finish stays exactly where it was. Spend more than you have, and the finish comes with you. That is the critical path.

On the Pump station, the steel is ready a week before the footings. That week is float. There is no Save button to hunt for: a schedule made here saves itself as you go.

Fourth stop: mark what happened. Work starts, plans meet weather, and the schedule needs to hear about it. Progress starts with a date, and the data date lives in Full mode. More opens it.

Full mode brings back the Schedule menu, and Set data date with it. Set data date: the day your update is true. Spotlight shows what should have happened by then.

Spotlight hatches the days in between and rings the three activities that should have moved. Update progress marks them as planned: finished ones done, the rest under way.

What moved reports the effect. As planned, nothing moved, and the finish holds. The bars agree: Mobilise done, two under way, and the data date line at the twelfth.

When something runs late, say so. The digging needs three more days: type 13. What moved shows the cost: the work after it slips, and the finish with it. See Progress.

Back in Simple, percent done tells the same story, with the new finish beside it. Last stop: send it out. The owner wants to watch it; the people doing the work should update it.

Share makes a link. For the owner, the live kind: it follows every edit you make. Say who it is for and how long it lasts. No account needed. See Sharing and live links.

Copy it now and send it; it is shown only once. The owner watches, a few seconds behind. In Full mode, Updates, Assign owners gives activities an owner: just an email address.

The Owner column now says who answers for what: Jordan, for the digging and the footings. Send update request asks each owner for their dates, by a day you choose.

One button, only their activities, and the answers come back to you. See The update process.

That is the whole job. Every door you met has its own short entry. Next in the Guide: the library.

Taken from the video’s English captions.