The schedule

The schedule is the one screen CapacityLens is built around: every person, every allocation and every day of time off, all on a single zoomable grid. This page explains what you're looking at so you can read utilisation at a glance instead of clicking around to check.

Rows: your people

Each row is one person — a real teammate, a freelancer, or a placeholder for a role you haven't filled yet. Rows are grouped under a discipline heading (Design, Development, and so on) when your company uses disciplines, which is the default. A group header can be collapsed to {count} hidden, and shows an average utilisation figure for everyone in it when that figure is turned on in Settings.

Each row starts with an avatar and name, with the person's role shown underneath. A placeholder row is labelled with the word "Placeholder" instead of a name, and has a faint diagonal hatch on its header so it reads as unfilled at a glance.

Select the eye beside any visible name to open that person's read-only schedule. The drawer covers the current company week and the following three weeks, combining every allocation and personal time-off entry that overlaps that range. It opens over the grid, so your visible dates, filters and scroll position stay exactly where you left them.

People marked as favourites stay at the top of their discipline, in alphabetical order. Everyone else follows alphabetically, then placeholders. Favourite external parties lead the separate External group. Favourites are shared with everyone in the company rather than being a personal display preference.

When disciplines are turned off, the same people move into Studio and Supplementary bands. External / 3rd party stays last. If disciplines are on but a person has not been assigned to one yet, that person also falls back to their Studio or Supplementary band after the discipline groups.

Select a group heading to collapse it when you need more vertical space. The heading stays visible and reports how many rows are hidden; select it again to expand the group.

Columns: the visible weeks

Columns are days, grouped into a zoomable range of one, two, four, six or eight weeks at a time — the Weeks visible dropdown in the toolbar switches between them. Use the arrow buttons (hover for "Back one week" / "Forward one week") to pan a week at a time, and Today to jump back to the current week.

Weekend columns get a faint tint when you're zoomed in close enough to see individual days clearly. In the one- and two-week views, each month and year starts above the first visible day it describes. Wider views keep a compact month label in sight as you scroll.

At the same close zoom levels, a person's Half day is shown by tinting the bottom half of that day's cell. The full cell remains available for clicking, drawing and editing work; the tint is a capacity cue, not a smaller interaction target. Time off or a fully non-working day still fills the whole cell.

Allocation bars

An allocation — a person booked on a project for a date range — shows as a coloured bar spanning the days it covers, coloured by project or activity. Three statuses are visible directly on the bar:

• Confirmed — a plain, solid bar. This is the default when you create one.
• Tentative — the same bar with a dashed border and a light diagonal hatch, so work that isn't locked in yet still stands out from confirmed work.
• Completed — the bar's label gets a checkmark prefix.

Depending on your device preferences, a bar's label can also show the client and project name ahead of the activity name, plus the hours booked per day. Companies that plan in Blocks don't book hours at all — see Projects and allocations for how the different scheduling modes work.

Allocations created together with Repeat show a small repeat cue at the start of each linked bar. Hover or focus the bar to see the last surviving date in that series. The cue marks the link between occurrences; each occurrence can still be edited on its own.

The individual schedule drawer lists the complete date range, status and daily hours for each overlapping allocation. Project work includes its project and client; other work keeps its activity attribution. A linked repeat also reports the last surviving date in its series.

When Show task field in schedule is enabled in Settings, an allocation can also carry a short Task description. It appears above Notes when you hover or focus a bar and in the person's schedule drawer. The setting is off by default; turning it off hides the field and details but preserves existing task text for when it is enabled again.

Reading overwork

CapacityLens never makes you run a report to find out who's overbooked:

• A utilisation percentage sits beside each row, and can also be shown as a company-wide total and a per-discipline average — all three are switches in Settings. A person's own percentage turns bold and red as soon as they're booked over capacity within the next 14 days, regardless of what's currently zoomed into view.
• Any day where a person is booked for more than they're available gets a red band under the bars for that day, so the exact day that tips someone over capacity is obvious without doing the maths yourself.

TIP

The utilisation percentage itself is worked out over whatever date range is currently visible — one, two, four, six or eight weeks. Zoom out to two weeks and a person's percentage will usually drop, because it's now averaged over more days; zoom back to one week and it rises again. That's expected, not a bug: the percentage always answers "how booked is this person over the weeks I'm looking at right now?" The red over-capacity warning is separate and doesn't move when you zoom — it always looks at the fixed next 14 days, so someone can show red even while you're viewing a wider, less-full-looking range.

Time off on the same canvas

Time off — holiday, sick leave or unpaid leave — is drawn on the same grid as work, as a hatched block with no project colour, so a person's real availability is always visible in one place rather than hidden in a separate calendar.

Personal time off also appears in the individual's four-week drawer. Owners and Admins can read its note; Editors and Viewers see the dated absence without that private detail. Company closures and ordinary non-working days are not repeated in the drawer.

Company closures are created in their own section of the Time off page. Each closure appears once as a named band across every person and placeholder it covers, including people added later. It does not cover the External group. A personal time-off block can overlap the band; both remain visible because they record independent facts.

An Hours or Days allocation that exceeds the remaining availability gets the usual red over-capacity band. Blocks deliberately carry no hours and keep utilisation at 0%, but a Block that overlaps time off still gets the red conflict treatment so the clash cannot disappear inside the holiday hatch. See Time off for an example.

Filtering and searching

Use Show filters at the right of the toolbar, after Undo and Redo, to open the filter row. Select Hide filters when you want the extra vertical space back. Hiding the row does not clear an active filter.

Person search stays on the left. The discipline, client, project and activity filters sit in a group on the right, followed by the Show tentative / Hide tentative and Work / Time off controls. The group wraps at narrower desktop widths without changing the keyboard order.

The project menu keeps All projects first, then sorts projects by client and project. A code name controls the alphabetical position when one is set. In each option, the client and slash are grey so the project name is easier to scan; the complete Client / Project label remains available to assistive technology. Selecting a client or project narrows the bars and rows to that work. The active value stays visible, and Clear Filters turns red so the filtered state cannot be mistaken for the complete schedule.

After selecting a client, project or activity, turn on Show unallocated to bring people with no matching work back into the result. Their rows are dimmed, which makes them useful candidates to staff without implying they are already booked to the filter.

Clear Filters stays at the far right of the open row. It is quiet and disabled when nothing is filtered, then turns red with a bin icon when a filter is active. One click resets the search, every dropdown and Show unallocated, and returns tentative work to Show tentative.

An individual schedule is independent of this grid view. Its fixed four-week range does not change when you pan or zoom, and it includes the person's matching commitments even when a search, project filter, tentative-work setting or draw mode hides them on the grid.

Every change on the schedule — dragging, resizing, deleting an allocation — can be undone and redone from the toolbar, or with Ctrl/Cmd+Z, if you have edit access.

TIP

Rows, colours and percentages update live as you drag. There's nothing to refresh and nothing to recalculate — what you see is always current.

What's next

People and placeholders covers who can appear on the schedule, and Projects and allocations covers how the bars themselves get created.