Add Durations to Each Task

Quick reference

• 00:04 Right now, we have a list of tasks in our project.
• 00:07 As you can see, we haven't estimated the duration for these tasks yet.
• 00:12 So that's the next thing that we're going to do.
• 00:13 Now you might be wondering what this "1 day?" is.
• 00:19 Well first of all whenever you create a task it's always set
• 00:23 as one day in duration.
• 00:25 The question mark means that it's estimated.
• 00:29 If I double click on this task, and I can double click on the duration field, or
• 00:33 double click on the row.
• 00:34 I'll just double click anywhere I want here on the task.
• 00:38 You can see there's an estimated check box on the general tab and
• 00:43 if I deselect that, the question mark goes away.
• 00:48 I'll cancel this screen.
• 00:50 Another way to remove the question mark is to just go ahead and type over it.
• 00:54 So I'll just type one and press enter.
• 00:56 And what you can see now is that the question mark is gone.
• 01:01 This question mark is designed to give you some indication as to what tasks
• 01:06 have been estimated and which ones have not been estimated yet.
• 01:12 There's another way to look at these estimated tasks, and that's if you go to
• 01:16 the view tab and then up on the view tab you'll find a filter area.
• 01:22 And you can locate that in the data section
• 01:26 you can see this little picture of a the filter.
• 01:28 If I click the pick list here, we have this task
• 01:33 with estimated durations option, and that will filter only the tasks
• 01:38 on the screen that are task that have the question mark next to them.
• 01:42 Now I'm gonna turn this filter off.
• 01:45 So I'll just go back up here to the filter list and choose no filter.
• 01:50 This question mark doesn't really do anything else to your project
• 01:53 other than to let you know you probably want to do something with the task.
• 01:59 Just as before, you typically sit down with your team and
• 02:03 ask how long each one of these is going to take.
• 02:06 Now, one of the things you probably wanna avoid is asking people how many
• 02:11 hours it's going to take, how many weeks it's going to take.
• 02:14 Focus everyone on what is the duration.
• 02:18 We can get down to the details of how many hours it will take afterwards.
• 02:22 So it's a good idea to just sit down and talk about the durations.
• 02:26 Now, when you enter duration and
• 02:29 you start getting estimates, you just type the duration and press Enter.
• 02:34 We have a default of days.
• 02:37 If yours is not displaying that, just type the d next to it, so 20 d,
• 02:41 10 d, and what's happening now,
• 02:47 is as you're typing the letter d its changing it to days.
• 02:52 Now you can list things as months,days, minutes, weeks.
• 02:56 If I do this though and put weeks in here.
• 03:00 And most everything else is listed in days,
• 03:02 it's gonna be very hard to notice that this is a weeks.
• 03:06 So it's a very good idea to just keep everything always the same.
• 03:10 Don't mix and match days, weeks, minutes, months.
• 03:13 And just keep it as days.
• 03:18 I'll go ahead and finish entering in the rest of the durations for this project.
• 03:31 Now as I get to the last task here, you'll notice that it says, move in.
• 03:35 Well actually, that is kind of the last thing that we do, and
• 03:40 everything is set up in our house.
• 03:41 So this might just be a milestone.
• 03:44 So I'll go ahead and type zero and watch what happens over here on the right hand
• 03:48 side of the Gantt chart when I press enter.
• 03:51 It turns into a milestone.
• 03:53 We'll create more milestones in our project later.
• 03:56 Now I wanna talk a little bit about these durations that we entered.
• 04:00 As I mentioned before, we want to keep the durations in days, but
• 04:05 we also want to try and keep these durations at a higher level.
• 04:10 So not less than than five days.
• 04:13 It's not like it's a hard and fast rule that you shouldn't create durations less
• 04:17 than five days, but it's a good idea to think in terms of weeks rather than,
• 04:22 or sorry, five days and more as a task, rather than one day, two day.
• 04:27 There's certain times that they belong.
• 04:29 You also do not want to put tasks in your project that have very long durations,
• 04:35 unless it makes sense.
• 04:37 So for example, this acquire lands task,
• 04:39 while you're going through the process of working with the banks and you know,
• 04:44 acquiring that land and getting whatever kind of city permits and what have you,
• 04:49 that you need just in order to do that, this might just take that long.
• 04:54 There may not be many tasks in here, you're just waiting.
• 04:57 And so, that's okay, we can just go ahead and leave it as 30 days.
• 05:01 But consider that sometimes when you have these long duration tasks,
• 05:05 it's very hard to manage, because there might be more work that's going on
• 05:09 that you should know about as a project manager.

Lesson notes are only available for subscribers.