Multitasking

Do you work on a number of tasks each day, perhaps taking a number of days to complete each task? If so, it's important to realize that LiquidPlanner does not schedule your work that way.  Priority-based scheduling assumes that you will finish one task before starting the next one.      

Consider a prioritized list of your own tasks where there are no delays or dependencies in play: 

Your top priority task will be scheduled to start on the current date, and the earliest start date for any of your other tasks will be equal to the earliest finish of the previous task in the priority order.  This is being calculated for you automatically based on your availability, the expected efforts for your tasks and their priority order. 

Does this mean that you can't multitask?

Well no, the reality is that most of us multitask to some degree.  You can log a few hours of time to your higher priority task, then go work on a lower priority task and log progress to that one.  Then you might go back to a higher priority task, etc.  Logging progress and re-estimating faithfully as you go is the key to keeping your rolled-up schedule accurate when you're working tasks out of order.   You can also re-prioritize or delay a task if you know that you won't get back to it for a good while. 

Hard-core multitaskers often want to model multitasking in the literal sense; they want to see their schedule bars stacked with the same start dates on several tasks.  If that's you, then priority-based scheduling may not be the best fit.  But before deciding it's not, ask yourself why you are multitasking so heavily.  Is it truly a requirement of the work you do?  If the answer is not a clear-cut 'yes', consider heeding the advice of endless productivity studies, and work to avoid multitasking as much as possible.