Creating a Plan

A Plan is the top-level container for your schedule. It defines the planning window, the time unit you want to work in, and the settings the scheduler should use.

To create one, go to the Plans dashboard, click New Plan, and enter the Plan Name, Start Date, and Duration. Then choose the Planning unit and select the Plan Type that best matches how your team works.

Choosing a Plan Type

Workable supports different planning styles so the schedule can match your team’s workflow:

Project Management: Traditional project scheduling with flexible timelines. Best for waterfall or general project work.
Agile/Scrum: Sprint-based planning for iterative development.
Shape Up: Basecamp-style bet cycles with fixed time boxes and variable scope.
Hourly/Day Planner: Short-term task scheduling for operational planning or daily standups.

The plan type sets sensible defaults, but you can still adjust durations and constraints to fit the way your team actually plans work.

Understanding Planning Units

Your planning unit affects both the way the timeline is displayed and how work is grouped for scheduling:

Hours: Extremely granular planning for short-term task scheduling.
Days: Detailed daily planning for operational work.
Weeks: Best for short-to-medium-term planning with clear resource visibility.
Months: Better for long-term strategic planning and high-level capacity planning.

Choose the unit that best matches the level of detail you need:

Match your planning horizon
Consider your team’s workflow cadence
Think about how you need to communicate the schedule to stakeholders

You can change planning units between scenarios to view the same plan at different levels of detail.

Plan Settings

Plan settings control how the scheduler interprets some of your constraints. Holiday policies are especially important because they change when people can and cannot be assigned. These settings are stored per scenario, which means different scenarios can test different holiday policies without changing the whole plan.

Holiday Policies

Assign people on legal holidays

Not allowed (default): The scheduler will not assign people to work on legal or public holidays.
Allowed: The scheduler can assign people to work on legal holidays.

When legal holidays are not allowed, Workable treats those days as hard constraints. It fetches public holidays from the holiday provider, filters them by each person’s country and state, keeps recognised holiday types, and converts them into the work periods used by your plan. People are then treated as unavailable during those periods.

If a pinned person’s legal holidays overlap with all periods of a required project, the schedule becomes infeasible.

Assign people on scheduled holidays

Not allowed (default): The scheduler respects people’s Scheduled Holidays such as vacation or sick leave.
Allowed: The scheduler ignores scheduled holiday constraints.

Scheduled holidays work in a similar way, but they come from the dates you enter for each person rather than from a public holiday provider. When scheduled holidays are not allowed, the scheduler treats that time away as a hard constraint.

People cannot be assigned to committed projects during their scheduled holidays, although consultants can still consult on projects during those dates.

Holiday sensitivity for day, week, month, quarter, and year plans:

This setting controls how legal holidays are treated when your plan uses larger time periods such as days, weeks, months, quarters, or years.

Strict: Any holiday in a period blocks the entire period.
Moderate: Holidays must cover more than 30% of the period to block it.
Lenient: Holidays must cover more than 50% of the period to block it.
Low: Holidays must cover more than 75% of the period or full plan to block it.

Holiday sensitivity is used in these cases:

Applies to plans with duration units of Days, Weeks, Months, Quarters, or Years
Does not affect Hours or Minutes plans
Is stored at the plan level and applies to all scenarios within that plan

Example scenarios:

A month-level plan with a 1-day Christmas holiday is blocked only in Strict mode.
A month-level plan with a 2-week end-of-year vacation is blocked in Strict and Moderate mode.
A week-level plan with a 1-day Friday holiday is blocked only in Strict mode.
A 30-day day-level plan with 2 public holidays is blocked only in Strict mode.

Scenario-Level Settings

Because holiday policies are stored at the scenario level, you can create multiple scenarios and compare the effect of different policy choices without changing your baseline plan.

Examples:

Baseline scenario: Respects all legal and scheduled holidays
Aggressive scenario: Ignores scheduled holidays to see maximum capacity
Year-round scenario: Allows work on legal holidays
Emergency scenario: Ignores all holiday constraints

Holiday Constraint Examples

Example 1: Legal holiday conflict

Plan: 4-week software project
Person: John Doe in the US
Legal holiday: New Year’s Day in Period 1
Setting: Legal holidays are Not allowed
Result: John cannot work in Period 1. If the project only runs in Period 1 and John is pinned, the schedule is infeasible.

Example 2: Scheduled holiday override

Person: Jane Smith has scheduled vacation for weeks 2-3 of a 6-week plan
Setting: Scheduled holidays are Allowed
Result: Jane can still be assigned during those weeks for scenario testing.