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Types of Task Effort

Overview

There are three types of effort in Wrike: Basic, Daily, and Flexible.

Basic effort type

Basic effort type works when your team members have to switch between several tasks during the day, and all task assignees equally contribute to its completion.

When Basic effort type is selected:

  • Effort and duration are completely independent of each other.

  • Effort is spread evenly among duration and all task assignees.

Use case example: Estimate if all tasks can be completed during a workweek.

Daily effort type

Use the Daily effort type to allocate a certain amount of effort per day for each task assignee in the form of hours per day or the percentages of users’ daily capacity:

  • Set a specific number of hours per day a user(s) should work to complete the task. The total effort for a user(s) in the task is then calculated as (the number of hours per day * the task duration * the number of assignees). If you shorten or extend the task duration, the total effort is re-calculated automatically.

  • Set a percentage of the working day that a user(s) should spend working on a task. The total allocated effort for the task is similarly calculated as (the users’ allocated percentage per day (in hours) * the task duration * the number of assignees).

    Note

    The default users’ daily capacity used for the Daily effort type is 8 hours and it can’t be changed.

    For example, a user can work on two tasks at the same time, and using the Daily effort type, you can allocate 50% of the user’s daily capacity to be spent on each of the tasks. If the tasks have 5-day durations and the user is a single assignee, the total allocated effort for each task will be 50%(4 h/d)*5days*1 assignee = 20 hours. If the tasks have two assignees, the total effort of each task will be doubled: 50%(4 h/d)*5days*2 assignees = 40 hours.

Use case example: Estimate the required effort based on the task complexity.

Flexible effort type

Select Flexible effort type to gain full control over effort allocation. Using this effort mode, you can split the total effort differently for each day of the task's duration and for each assignee.

When Flexible effort type is selected:

  • You can specify the number of hours independently for each assignee and for each working day.

  • You'll see two values separated by / in the Effort field: the number of allocated hours and the total effort. This way you always know how many hours are yet to be allotted to the task assignees.

Note

  • You can enable Flexible effort and allocate different hours of effort per each assignee in Task view, but if you need to specify the exact hours of effort per day for each user, you need to do that on Workload charts or in Resources view.

  • Flexible effort allocations are connected to the task duration, which means that if you reschedule tasks with Flexible effort, Wrike will keep your effort allocations.

  • If you need to reassign tasks with flexible effort and want to keep your flexible effort allocations, you need to do this via drag-and-drop on Workload charts or in Resources view. If you reassign these tasks in any other view, your flexible allocations will be cleared.

  • The flexible effort type is not supported in recurrent tasks.

Use case example: Tasks that require a different amount of time from different assignees and on different days.

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