We do not currently support recurring tasks or daily effort limits which can be useful for certain kinds of tasks.  Until we do, here is one technique you can use to model multi-tasking.

This approach requires that you create several tasks (see add multiple) and then set staggered delay until dates on individual tasks.

In this example, assume there is 1-2 days of effort per week of high priority specification work on the Eagle project.  That spec work will run at this rate for 5 consecutive weeks. In most cases we don’t really care when it happens in that week, only that time needs to be allocated to the spec work. What’s key is that the remaining availability be used on lower priority tasks. 

Here are the low priority tasks we want to multi-task in with the high priority spec work. Note when they finish before we add in the high priority work:

Here is the modeling with the highly priority spec work (which cannot be done at 100% weekly effort). The Delay Until values are set to consecutive Mondays.

Note how the low priority work stretches out; this is because a low priority task will temporarily pause when a higher priority task is ready to go.  The low priority task will resume when nothing higher priority is ready to go. Overall the low priority work takes longer as you’d expect. We call this feature of LiquidPlanner “Flow around”.

The Spec work is in a dedicated tasklist so that we could easily use a dependency between the tasklist and the final task called “Wrap up spec”. You can also collapse the tasklist for reporting and use it for commenting. If you are time tracking, you might want to create an activity code for the spec work.

Another advantage of this approach is that you might find some weeks get a little more time or a little less opportunity to work on the spec and you can modify the plan for that easily enough on the fly. If you are not able to hit that pace for the spec work, the spec work blocks will start pushing forward and the pile up should alert you to trouble.