Resource management is the process of planning the use of your resources and coordinating their allocation. Resources can be anything your business needs to operate efficiently – employees, equipment, or even your brand assets. Whatever your resources are, monday.com is here to help you keep your business on track!

Note: This feature is only available in Pro and Enterprise plans.

Before you start

To measure your team members’ workload, you’ll want to make sure your boards include the following features:

• People column
• Date column or timeline
• Optional – A number column or formula to indicate the effort required for each task; i.e., 1 hour, 6 hours
• Work Schedule – This setting allows you to set the work days, hours, and breaks in the user’s work schedule. You can customize this setting in the administrative section of your account.

Tip: Read more about how the work plan interacts with capacity in the load widget and also about managing availability in the lower sections of this article. Alternatively, you can learn more about the work plan in the admin settings.

How to add the clutter widget

You can add the load widget to both your board and dashboard so that it is easily accessible at all times.

• Add to your board

Click on option at the top of your dashboard (it will say “Add View” when you hover over it). Select “More Views” and look for “Load” in the Views Center:

• Add to your dashboard

To add the load widget to your dashboard, click “+ Add Widget” and select “Load”:

Tip: While adding the Load widget to a board view will pull data from that specific board, by adding the widget to a dashboard you can select multiple boards to connect the widget to. This will allow you to see information from multiple boards, all in one place.

Basic settings

• Select the time column.

Because this view checks all items assigned to a person during a specific period, your board must include either a date column or a timeline column .

• Select the resource type

Now you need to choose what type of resource you want to represent in the load. The resource type can be any group, table column in your table. This will determine how the load distribution looks like.

Tip: To see the user’s work plan, make sure your resource settings are set to “People Column”.

• Color by

Choose to color the bars of items in your load using any of your columns, groups, or boards. Go to “Color By” in the settings menu to color items by a category of your choosing and give you specific information at a glance. The colors shown are the colors you’ve already selected for your board’s main table view. For example, if you select “Status,” your items will be colored in the color that represents each label in your board’s status column.

Measure effort and capacity

Effort and Capacity are the settings by which your data is sorted and displayed. Using this card, found in your Load widget settings, you can adjust how you pull data.

• Measure effort

You can choose to measure the effort put in by each user using either “Item Count” or “Effort.” If you choose “Item Count,” each item assigned to that person will be counted as one and displayed in the dashboard.

Sometimes, however, some of our tasks require more effort or carry more weight on the project. In this case, we use “effort” defined by a time estimate column, a numeric column, or a formula column.

When more than one person is working on a task, we can choose to display how they “divide the effort” between them. We can toggle between “Distribution,” which will divide the effort equally among the partners, and “Summary,” which will give each partner the total number of hours the project took.

Show me an example.

In the example below, we chose “Split” because Lindy and Leah will split the 10 hours allocated to this project equally. In the view, we can see that they each have 5 hours allocated to the project. If Lindy and Leah worked together on the project, and they spent a combined 10 hours, we would choose “Summary”, and we would see all 10 hours reflected in Lindy’s workload as well as Leah’s.

• Set capacity by work plan or by custom

Once completed, we can select a capacity for the user. Capacity will be based on either ” Work Schedule ” or “Custom” in the load widget. Both settings will calculate the user’s work schedule, showing work days and days off, but the calculation of working hours is different.

Note: Work plan capacity settings only work if effort and capacity are measured by “Effort” and not “Item Count”. While “Custom” can utilize the “Item Count” setting to measure capacity.

If you view your calendar by weeks, the colors of the circles will reflect the capacity you have set. However, if you change the calendar to view by days, the capacity will be divided evenly across the 5 working days of the week. In other words, a capacity of 20 hours will be divided by 5, and will appear as 4 hours per day of the week.

Similarly, if you view your widget by months, your capacity of 5 would be multiplied by 4 weeks per month, showing you a monthly capacity of 20. This may or may not reflect your intentions when you set your weekly capacity, so it’s important to keep this in mind.

• Show workload as tasks with numbers or as percentages

You have the option to display your bubbles as numbered tasks or by calculating the percentage each bubble represents of your total workload.

Interesting tip: Did you know that monday.com can also be used for personal project management? Many users find that the platform is useful not only for work but also for organizing their daily lives, such as planning vacations, managing a personal budget, and even tracking fitness goals.

Workload availability management

The Workload widget is customizable based on each user’s work schedule, via the team they are assigned to. A work schedule is assigned to a team by the account administrator and reflects each user’s exact calendar. This will more accurately determine a team member’s availability in the Workload widget as it will reflect work days and hours and vacation times.

You can only add and configure work plans if you are an administrator of the account. Go to the admin section by clicking on your profile picture in the top right corner of your page, click on the “General” tab and select “Work Plan”. You can then name and configure different work plans based on users and their specific work parameters.

Note: A work plan is assigned to a team and will be given to all users on that team. Read more about how to create a team work plan.

Understanding colors

• Blue bubble – the person has reached capacity
• Light blue bubble with a dark bubble in the center – the person is below maximum effort. The size of the inner circle reflects how close the person is to reaching capacity.
• Red bubble – the person has exceeded the limit of their capacity.
• Red bars: The person has a day off, a day off from the office, or a vacation day. If a red exclamation mark appears inside the red bars, it indicates that a task was assigned on a team member’s day off.
• Gray bars: indicate the person’s weekend and are constantly on the calendar.

Understanding the results

Let’s go back to our project overview board example. Here, Lindy has been assigned two tasks, which take 1.5 and 2.5 hours respectively.

To understand the results, we need to look at two factors:

1. How many hours does it take to complete the task?
2. How many days do we have to complete this?
3. The person’s weekly capacity, to understand why they are under/over capacity.

Let’s go back to our board:

In this example, recording a video takes 4 hours of work and needs to be completed within 8 working days, not including weekends. This means that each day, we will need to focus 0.5 hours of work on this task. It’s just a simple math equation:

Equation: Number of hours to complete the task / Number of working days

Dig for more details

If you want to take a closer look at the team’s tasks, you can click on each of the circles and see the tasks listed in that time range.

Tip: Using the People quick filter at the top of the workload widget, you can select multiple people, and the widget will only display the people you selected. This makes it easy to view workload data for specific teams or individuals.

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