Planning in an online agenda

Many of our clients used online calendars for planning in the past. Now, they have successfully transitioned to vPlan to gain more convenience, insight, and control over activity planning.

In calendars, appointments are always scheduled, but many companies misuse appointments to schedule tasks or assignments. An appointment always has a start and end time, automatically giving it a duration.

In vPlan, cards are used for planning. A card can be anything from an appointment to a task, and from a work order to an event. It can have a duration or not. You determine how you want to use cards in your planning. This provides more flexibility than with online calendars.

Is a start and end time necessary?

The first question to ask is whether planned tasks necessarily need a start and end time.

Imagine you work at a marketing agency and today you need to design a logo. Designing a logo typically takes about 2 hours. When scheduling this activity, it's not necessary to start precisely at 8:30 AM and finish at 10:30 AM.

When you plan based on sequence and priority, you schedule a 2-hour block for today, without a start and end time. What's important is knowing that you've allocated 2 hours out of the 8 available work hours for that day.

Can you do multiple activities at once?

In calendars, it's possible to schedule multiple activities at the same time. But is this realistically feasible for your scheduled employee? Can they actually execute these two appointments or tasks simultaneously?

In most cases, this results in a double booking and is incorrectly planned. As a result, you lack insight into the total hours occupied for that day.

When working with sequence and priority, there are no time-based tasks and activities. Therefore, double booking is never possible. Priority ensures a clear sequence of tasks to be completed.

Of course, you can still schedule too many tasks and activities, exceeding the total availability of the employee. vPlan will alert you to this and allow you to take quick action to resolve the issue.

What determines priority?

What should you do first on a workday? In a calendar, the first scheduled appointment or task is always the one you execute first. But is this also the appointment/task with the highest priority? Perhaps the scheduled task (2 hours of designing) at 3:00 PM is more important.

Shifting appointments is difficult because the block size often adjusts to the duration of the appointment. Automatic rescheduling of other tasks does not occur; you must reschedule each one manually.

When working with sequence, you prioritize tasks by placing the most important task at the top. Automatically, the remaining tasks shift accordingly. This saves a lot of manual work.

Give freedom to your employees

An agenda with tasks and appointments, such as Outlook or Google Calendar, is a fixed structure. It determines down to the minute when something must be done and when it must be completed. You would need to be an enormous planner to know and keep track of that precisely. The scheduled employee may see this as burdensome and feel unnecessary pressure. Employees often want to have some control over their own schedule.

When you work with planning based on sequence, the employee still sees the same number of tasks that need to be performed. But now, the employee can determine their own schedule and therefore also the order of tasks. Additionally, it's common for a task to be started in the morning, partially completed, and then another task finished first. The other task is then completed in the afternoon.

Conclusion

Of course, it's important that when you schedule appointments and agree on a start and end time, you stick to these agreements. Planning based on sequence and priority, for example, doesn't work for a dentist. But if start and end times aren't the most critical components of your planning, then don't use an (online) calendar; instead, use software that can better support your needs, such as vPlan.

Here are a few more advantages of vPlan compared to (online) calendars like Outlook Calendar and Google Calendar:

• Customize your cards flexibly with free fields, labels, attachments, comments, etc.
• Different views: not just a calendar, but also a list view.
• View the schedule not only from the employee's perspective but also from the department and/or status of cards.
• With logging on cards, you always know who, what, and when something was added or changed.