Plan around vacation
Free
Ten working days do not always occupy the same number of calendar days. A holiday inside an activity makes its bar longer, even though the amount of scheduled work stays the same.
Use the roadmap property “Plan in work days”. The roadmap in this guide already uses it. With calendar-day planning, a vacation period does not remove working time from the schedule.
The same duration, a longer bar
Check requirements and Build prototype each start with ten working days: Monday through Friday across two weeks. Watch the animation add Summer vacation from 12 to 16 July. The requirements activity is outside that period, so it stays put. The prototype crosses it, so its end moves from 16 to 23 July. Prepare demo, which waits for the prototype, follows.
The prototype now occupies 19 calendar days, compared with 12 before the vacation. It still has ten working days. The shaded period explains the longer bar; it does not represent extra work.
Do it in your own roadmap
- Open the roadmap’s Properties and choose Plan in work days.
- Add a period with the vacation's start and end dates, and mark it as vacation.
- In your custom timeline view, show period names so the shaded interval has a label.
- Check activities that overlap it and anything that waits for those activities.
A period that is not marked as vacation is a visual annotation. A vacation period affects the whole roadmap's work calendar, rather than an individual team's availability. Weekends are also excluded in work-day planning.
Touch or scroll the embedded roadmap to stop the animation and try moving a bar. Use replay to start the demonstration again. Open in Tidigar opens your own copy of the plan as it currently appears.
For the larger planning context, explore the product launch example. To understand why the demo follows the prototype, read Moving activities and dependencies.
How the work calendar works in detail
One calendar applies to the whole plan
Plan in work days excludes Saturday, Sunday and every date inside a vacation period, including its start and end. Overlapping vacations do not subtract the same day twice. The first weekday shown in the timeline changes its presentation, not which days are weekends. Tidigar does not infer public holidays from your country; add the relevant dates as vacation periods.
Vacation is shared availability for this roadmap. A period cannot give one team a different working week or reserve a person's capacity. An ordinary period without Vacation: no work days only annotates the timeline, regardless of its name. Calling it “Holiday” alone does not change scheduling.
Changing vacation preserves the amount of work
Adding, extending, shortening or deleting a vacation recalculates activities using the amount of work they had under the previous calendar. A ten-work-day activity remains ten work days; its calendar span may grow or shrink. Starts move to allowed work days, dependent activities follow, and milestones that follow those activities may move. Check the whole chain, including activities outside the visible filter.
Turning on work-day planning counts the weekdays in the existing activity dates before applying the plan's vacations. Turning it off keeps the current dates and uses calendar days for later scheduling. It does not restore an earlier calendar-day layout. Review durations after changing this roadmap property.
Duration and appearance answer different questions
In work-day planning, the activity's Duration (work days) counts scheduled work. Moving the whole activity preserves that count, even across a vacation. Editing its duration or resizing one end changes the work being scheduled. The start must be a work day; the end is the last work day needed for its duration.
A bar's total span still runs across calendar dates. At a detailed timeline scale, non-working gaps can appear as connectors between work segments; a coarser scale can suppress weekend gaps. Hiding period names or changing a view's scale does not make those dates available for work. These are view settings; the work calendar and period dates belong to the plan.
Milestones are points, not work durations
A fixed milestone can stay on a weekend or vacation date. An activity waiting for it starts on that date at the earliest, or the next work day if the date is unavailable. A milestone following activities must be after their latest end, but an ordinary date edit can leave it on a non-working day. Compact the plan explicitly places following milestones on the next work day. See Two kinds of milestone and dependency scheduling before compacting away intentional gaps.