2024-09-02
You can access the Notion page shown in the video at this link [https://bit.ly/workload-demo-notion]. Below is the full video transcript. Click the summary button on this page if you would like a summary of the transcript.
If you use Notion with your team, you might want to see the number of tasks that they have in their schedule that are incomplete so that you can manage the workload and allocate responsibilities accordingly. And there isn't a really clear way to visualize this in Notion, so you can build your own way, and that's what this video is about. It answers the fundamental question: how can we visualize the workload of tasks in Notion so that we can manage the resources or people in the team and the amount of work that they do at any given time? To explore the answer to this question, we look at two approaches. The first one is going to be the most straightforward approach in one single task database. This approach will have a few limitations. To address those limitations, we will explore the second option that is a bit more elaborate but can also provide charts where you can visualize the amount of time per person per week, for example, in a simple chart. So let's dive into it.
Let's look at the first approach. Here is a tasks database, and there is a duration property that is of number type. For this use case, let's say you want to see tasks grouped by assignee, and we want to see the sum of the duration in hours so that we can see how many hours each person has for their open tasks, meaning tasks that have not been completed yet. To create this view, we can add a new table. Let's say we want to use this predefined view that is by assignee. This groups tasks by assignee. So that's what we want.
In here, we can also show the duration property, and we can sum it here next to the assignee name. I can do "More options," sum duration hours, and these numbers are the same. Next up, I want to filter by status "To-do" and "In progress," and for now, that's good. I want to sort by due date ascending, so I can see test Simo, that is user number one, has 11 hours here. That's the sum of these two tasks. And this other user has 4.7 hours. That is the sum of these tasks. Now if I look a bit further, I can see that testsimo actually has some subtasks in here, and those subtasks have a duration, but this duration is not accounted for in the sum. So that's the limitation we have in the task database view. If we keep this view grouped with sub-items shown nested in toggle, to resolve this issue so that the sum is correct—because this should be eleven plus two plus three, so that is 16 hours in total if you consider the subtasks—we can go to "Customize," "Tasks," "Subtasks," and then show as flattened list. This will output the correct sum of the task duration.
And this is the case if you want to count the subtasks in addition to the parent task. If instead the parent task already accounts for the subtask duration in your use case, then you do not really need to do this. So the previous view with nested sub-items would be sufficient. But let's assume that we want to also count subtasks. If that's the case, then we can do this flattened list view and this will sum the correct amount of hours. So that's the first level. And how we can quickly create a view of tasks grouped by assignee. We can quickly filter what we want to see and then see the sum of duration. Or we can also count the number of tasks. If we have an effort property, we can sum the effort required, or we can also have a formula property that outputs specific points associated with the task based on a numeric effort and a numeric duration.
Now let's assume that you want to go further and maybe have a chart view of tasks, a bar chart that shows the total hours per person. So here is how we can approach that using a third database. Keep in mind that this is just one approach, so we could also have a different way to achieve this. But here is how I can achieve this, possibly quite smoothly in Notion. Here is the task database that I was looking at before the first step in creating the chart. And the chart would look like this here, for example, by person this week. And it shows the assignees on the left-hand side on the y-axis. And then it shows the sum in duration on the x-axis.
And you can see this is a bar chart and it is filtered by the active tasks and by this week or before this week. So these are all the tasks that are active. The first step in developing this solution is to create a new database that I called time summary. And this is, you can think of this as a line item database or a join table that's only here to allow us to get the chart view and do calculations on the tasks without running into that limitation with tasks and subtasks when it comes to calculating the sum in duration. And that is because when we create a chart view, at least currently in motion, if I try to do a chart view of the task database, like here for example, this is coming from the tasks database. And if I try to group by the due date week, as you can see here on the x axis, and then do the sum of hours on the y axis, group by as any, you can see that the sum doesn't correspond with the actual sum because it doesn't take into account sub tasks. And unlike in the table view that I showed you, the beginning of the video where we can actually do a flattened list that goes over this limitation in a chart. Currently that is not possible. So we can't really show the actual sum of tasks and sub tasks from the table in a chart. That is unless we use a possible solution by adding a a new property in the task database that takes into account all the subtasks and the parent tasks duration. But that is a different solution which I'm not exploring in this video. In this video I'm exploring a separate solution that is creating the joint table time summary that I mentioned before. So that's what the table looks like. This is a table with a name. It has a relation property to the task database that I showed you earlier. And then here there are formulas, and these formulas are just roll ups. Essentially. One is the duration of the task. This is taken from the related task here. Then there is the assignee, that is the assignee of that task, the date of the task and, and there is also a task status rollup property. So that's a rollup property. Type rollup. The relation is the task. The property displayed is the status from the related task. And we show the original. And the date is a formula task map current due first. So you only take the first date in there so that it is formatted properly as a date and we can use it in grouping. And this could also be a roll up. So it is a formula just to show another way of achieving that.
Then there is the assignee, which is the same. You do "task.map" to map the current assignee, so the assignee of this task. Now we flatten the list because this is a list of people, and we get the first person so that we can use this for grouping. And finally, duration—this as well can be a rollup, but it is a formula in this case. We map the duration from the task and we sum so that it is a number. To populate this database, we can set up an automation in the task database. So if you go back to the previous database that I was showing at the beginning of this video, you will find there is an automation, and this automation is called "When task created, add time summary." This means that whenever there is a task created in this database, a new time summary page will be created and automatically related to this task so that we can run analytics on that. So if I do "Edit," you can see here the trigger is "Page added." So when a page is added to the task database, then do this: add a page to the time summary database. The name is empty. We can't map the name dynamically, so I just entered a dash because we don't really need that. And the task is this page, that is the new page created from the trigger of the automation. And finally, once we have this setup, we know that we can create visualizations. For example, here is a timeline view that groups by person, and here it shows the sum in duration and it is set up by week. I created this timeline view by creating a linked view of a database using the command "linked view of database." Then I selected the time summary database and I created a timeline view here. And then from this menu, I set up the timeline view to customize it according to my needs. So I'm going to show you right now what that looks like here. From the three dots, I can see the layout, the properties displayed on the cards. I added some filters: only the tasks where the status is "To do" and "In progress," and what date is on or before one week from now. I grouped it by assignee, hiding empty groups, and that's it. I sorted by date.
So here you can see by week and by person the tasks that they have open. Here is a chart view, and this is coming from the time summary database because of the limitation I showed you before regarding creating a chart from the task database if you want to include subtasks in it. So chart is a view. That's just like any other view. The layout is chart, and in here I selected the horizontal bar chart showing the sum of duration on the x-axis. Here, that is a numeric value. And on the y-axis, we want to show the assignee sorted manually, but I can also sort by the sum like that. Then I selected no color, but I can also do auto. And in here I show data labels. I show the avatar and the name, but I can also show just the avatar here of the user. I show both axis names. These are the labels appearing here on the axes: duration and assignee. I show the grid lines. These are the very light gray grid lines that span horizontally and vertically on the graph. And I choose the medium height of this graph because that's enough. And finally, I also added two filters here that you can see. The status is "to do" and "in progress," and the date is this week or before today. And that's just a personal preference. If you want to see the tasks that are due either this week or before this week, if you want to see all tasks, then we do not need this filter. So here you can see the total time per person. Now on the three dots here you can see we can also group further the x-axis. For example, let's say you want to group by date week, and when I do this, all the data disappears. It is not clear to me why this happens. It looks like it's a bug with Notion charts currently, so we will see if it is solved by the time I release this video. That is in about a month. And this concludes the overview of how you can build workload views for tasks. For example, in Notion in particular, looking at duration properties, numeric properties in general, and the two options: one simple one that uses just one database, and the second solution using a join table that gets populated via a Notion automation from the tasks so that you can pull data dynamically in that database and visualize that data.
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