To Do List - Task Default Planned Hours

[AndrewQu2]

I've noticed that when I add a to‑do task—whether via the Home widget or within my personal to‑do list project—Workfront automatically sets the planned hours to 8 hours per day over the task’s duration. As a result, these tasks appear as fully allocated in the Workload Balancer, even when the actual work required is minimal.

While you can adjust a task’s duration from days to hours (which updates the calculated planned hours accordingly and uses the start and due dates to display the task duration in the Workload Balancer), this adjustment can only be made by navigating to your personal tasks project or setting up a personal tasks report—not directly from the widget. We’re currently using a naming convention that includes task planned hours so that PMs can see the actual allocation at a glance, but it isn’t an ideal solution.

Has anyone else encountered this behavior? Is there a way to override the default settings so that to‑do tasks can reflect more realistic workload estimates? Any workarounds or configuration tips would be much appreciated.

Thanks in advance!

[monicacardoso]

Hi @AndrewQu2,

Thank you for your question! I tested this behavior in my own Workfront instance and noticed that my personal tasks default to 0 planned hours and 0 duration; regardless of creating the task in the to-do widget, sending myself a work request through my Workfront profile or manually adding a task to my own project. I did not make any changes at the project level, so I would definitely like to investigate further into the behavior that you are seeing and compare our system-wide settings.

If you haven’t already, I would recommend submitting a support ticket for this with recent examples so that our team can troubleshoot.

Unfortunately, there isn’t a lot of documentation about personal tasks on Experience League, so we’d like to reach out to our internal Product team to obtain more details about the intended functionality. However, in order for us to do that, you need to have an active ticket with our support team. 

- Monica

[AndrewQu2 · Accepted solution]

Thanks for you response, I did file a support ticket and it appears there was a transient issue with the duration hours reporting in the workload balancer that has since been resolved. I subsequently submitted an idea (link below) for some improvements to the to-do task functionality to make it more useful, allowing users to mark those tasks with durations so project managers can take those time constraints into account when resourcing. 

https://experienceleaguecommunities.adobe.com/t5/workfront-ideas/enable-duration-and-planned-hours-f...