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Add Durations to Each Task

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About this lesson

Learn to standardize the type of duration you add to tasks in days or weeks for ease of use. 

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2013, 2019/365.

Exercise files

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Add Durations to Each Task.mpp
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Add Durations to Each Task - Completed.mpp
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Quick reference

Add Durations to Each Task

When you add durations to a project, you should standardize on the type of duration you enter. For example, do not create some tasks in days and other tasks in weeks. In most cases, using days is the best method. For example, if a task takes 2 weeks, then enter a duration of 10 days. The real reason for this is more for the sake of yourself and anyone else reading the project. Your eyes will read down a list of durations, and floating in the sea of days is a few tasks in weeks, which you might miss.

Further Discussion

You want to avoid using Microsoft Project to micro-manage your team. Unless you really have to, only create tasks that start at 5 days in duration. If they are shorter, you might be putting too much detail into your project. Of course, if there are very important tasks that take 1 or 2 days, you can add them, but try to keep that level of detail to a minimum.

By default, tasks have a question mark (?) next to them. This is a queue to you that you have not yet typed a duration into the task. You can type a question mark next to tasks if you want so you can remind yourself to go back and perform an estimate.

Steps

When adding durations, you can enter them in the following fashion:

  • If you type 5 and press enter, the default duration type of days will appear, so the task will show as 5 days.
  • If you type 5d and press enter, Microsoft Project will assume you want the task to appear in days and will show as 5 days.
  • If you type 5d?, the task will show as 5 days?, showing that the task still requires more estimating.
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  • 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.

Add Tasks to the Project
04m:41s
Add Predecessors to Each Task
05m:55s

PMI, PMP, CAPM and PMBOK are registered marks of the Project Management Institute, Inc.

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