“O tempora o mores” as said Cicero or “Oh time settings, oh resource plans” as we say here at Ganttic. No one in our office has actually ever said that.
However, maybe it really should be a saying since all the resource planning you do in Ganttic is based on time settings. As you already know, you can set general business days for your organization as well as resource specific business days for those that don’t work from Monday to Friday.
Add custom business hours into the mix and you’ll have capacity utilization percentages that perfectly describe the workloads of your resources. Sprinkle some task timing options on top of that and you can drag and drop schedule tasks like no other.
But you were missing some cherries on top, weren’t you? In this article, we’ll give you a couple of cherries. We’ll tell you how to turn off Mondays all together. That way you can enable lunch breaks, and actually find the time to eat the resource planning cake you have baked.
Exclude Days from Gantt Chart
Ugh. Mondays. Did you know that studies have shown a spike in heart attacks, strokes, and sudden cardiac deaths on Mondays? Well, that sucks, right? No worries, we got your back. Or we got your heart. Hehe.
You can turn off Mondays for good. You don’t have to see a Monday ever again if you log in to your resource planning tool. Just go to General Settings, click on Working Time and enable Mondays from the visible days in the chart. Click on save, and go back to a resource or a project view.
Mondays are gone! You have done it. Congratulations.
Yes, we do know that you are most likely going to use the feature to hide the weekends from the Gantt chart area but it’s just so more fun to think of it as a way to turn off Mondays. And you can’t deny it. Because as Garfield said, “Ugh. Mondays.”
Add Breaks to Business Hours
If turning off Mondays isn’t enough for you, let’s talk lunch.
Lunch breaks are undoubtedly an important part of any workday. Food gives you the energy you need to make those Gantt charts to reality or the energy to drag and drop schedule some more Gantt charts. The fact that eating the right foods can boost productivity isn’t a top-secret kind of thing that the government is trying to hide. You have probably felt it yourself after having a grilled salmon and some steamed broccoli for lunch.
But if you are not the kind of person that will have grilled salmon for lunch for productivity reasons, have a cheeseburger. Or two. Because you can get the same amount of dopamine from eating two cheeseburgers as you do from one orgasm. No need to worry about those cardiovascular risks either since you have already turned off Mondays. See above.
That’s probably something we don’t have to sell too hard. We love lunch. You love lunch. Everyone loves lunch. Somehow, we have still been depriving you of it. It’s not that we don’t want you to be productive or have burger orgasms. We are all for it. It’s just that… we weren’t sure if we should be the official spokes software for planning food related dopamine rises.
But now. The decision is made. Lunches are now an official part of resource schedules made in Ganttic. You can add breaks to the business hours.
It can be an hour for lunch. It can be 15 minutes for a machine to cool down. It can be half an hour to take a walk around the block. It can be two hours for lunch for someone that’s extra hungry. You can even add multiple breaks.
You can add a break for only one of your resources. You can add a break at a different time for each resource. As you can tell there’s quite a bit flexibility to fit in the kind of breaks you need. Get creative and add a report that describes the schedules you have made perfectly.