Day-to-day planning

Day-to-day team planning: a week inside All Do.

All Do is a free, web-based planner that puts a small team's tasks, time off, and capacity on one shared timeline — a swimlane per person — so the everyday questions answer themselves at a glance: who's doing what, who's free, and what ships by the date you promised. Most planning tools are built for the planning meeting. This one is built for the other four and a half days — the standup, the Tuesday priority flip, the surprise vacation, the "where are we?" message from a stakeholder. Here's what it actually does, walked through one ordinary week.

The day-to-day problem: the plan lives in five places

A team of two to ten rarely lacks a plan. It lacks one picture of the plan. The tasks are in a tracker, the deadlines in a spreadsheet, time off in a calendar nobody opens, capacity in the lead's head, and the status for stakeholders in a doc that was true two Fridays ago. Every day-to-day question — can Maya take this? what slips if she does? — means reconciling those five places by memory, usually at 9:05, in front of everyone.

All Do's bet is simple: if the work, the people, and the time all live in one view, most planning questions stop being questions. The rest of this page is that bet, tested against a normal week.

Monday: the standup happens on the board

The board is a timeline with a row per person. Tasks are bars with honest lengths; today is a marked line; each bar carries a small status shape — to do, doing, or done — and finished work fades back so your eye lands on what's live. Standup is just reading the board left to right: what's at today's line, per person, in seconds.

• One row per teammate — no digging through a backlog to see a person's week; their week is a horizontal glance.
• Status without ceremony — every task is to do, doing, or done, shown as a small shape right on the bar. No statuses to invent, no workflow to configure.
• Filters for focus — "Only me" shows your own row; a category filter dims everything but, say, the launch work; done tasks can be hidden entirely.
• On your phone — below desktop width the board becomes a per-person agenda with each teammate's availability and what's due next, so the standup works from the hallway too.

Tuesday: priorities flip — drag, don't renegotiate

A client moves a date, or the bug from Friday turns out to be load-bearing. In a spreadsheet this is where planning dies: shifting one row means recomputing every date after it, so nobody does, and the plan quietly becomes fiction.

In All Do a replan is a drag. Pull a task to Thursday, or onto another person's row, and the end date recomputes around weekends, holidays, and that person's time off — automatically, every time. Subtasks ride along with their parent. If a task can't start because another isn't done, a blocker mark says so without freezing anything: it's a flag for humans, not a dependency engine that locks the board. And because the board is realtime, seconds after you drop the bar the new plan is on every teammate's screen — the replan and its announcement are the same act.

Two safety nets make dragging feel cheap. Undo: Cmd+Z walks back your last changes, so trying a what-if costs nothing. Auto-pack: one button compacts a person's queue around their actual working days when a morning of edits has left gaps.

Wednesday: someone books time off

Ivan books Thursday–Friday for a conference. In most teams this lands in a calendar the plan never reads, and the deadline it breaks gets discovered the following week. In All Do, time off is drawn on the same timeline as the work — a striped block on Ivan's row — and it reshapes the work: any task that crosses it splits around the gap and finishes later, visibly, the moment the PTO lands. The deadline doesn't break silently; it moves in front of you, while it's still cheap to react.

This is also where capacity stops being a feeling. Each row carries a plain-language verdict computed from assigned days versus actual working days — "32% load · free Jun 24," "fully booked" — and the board header rolls the team up into one line: how loaded the period is and who frees up soonest. A thin capacity strip under each row marks the specific weeks that run hot, so "we're fine overall, but week 3 is brutal" is something you see, not something you discover. One filter shows only the people who are overbooked, which turns rebalancing from an audit into a short list.

If your team lives in Google Calendar, All Do can pull busy time from it, so the board reflects reality you've already recorded elsewhere.

Thursday: a stakeholder asks where things stand

The honest day-to-day answer to "can you send me the plan?" is usually a screenshot that's wrong by Friday. All Do gives the plan three honest exits:

• A read-only link — the live board, dated, with names reduced to initials. A client or exec sees real status without accounts, without edit risk, and without your team's details exposed.
• A clean, dated PDF — print the board and it becomes a per-person agenda on paper, for the meetings that want a deliverable rather than a login.
• CSV export — when someone upstream insists on a spreadsheet, give them one generated from the truth instead of maintained beside it.

Inside the team, sharing is a vault: boards live in shared spaces with owner, editor, and viewer roles, so the freelancer can edit the project board without being able to delete the quarter.

Friday: the review reads itself

Every view has an optional cutoff line — the date you actually promised. Work that lands past it is dimmed, and each person's row counts its overflow plainly: "4d past cutoff." The Friday question "what ships by the 22nd?" stops being a meeting and becomes a vertical line you look at. Milestones and notes ride above the lanes as memos, so "code freeze" is on the same picture as the work approaching it. Whatever didn't survive the week goes to the backlog — parked without dates, ready to drag onto a row when room appears.

The same board scales its horizon: tabs give you this quarter, next quarter, a single month, or the whole year, and the zoom slides from day-level detail to a quarter at a glance. Day to day you live at the week; planning lives one zoom out; both are the same data.

What All Do replaces — and what it doesn't

For a team of two to ten, one board typically replaces the planning spreadsheet, the separate PTO calendar, and the weekly status document. It does not replace:

• A ticket tracker — bugs, code review, and issue history belong in your tracker; All Do is the picture of people and time above it.
• HR software — it shows time off so plans survive it; it doesn't do approvals, balances, or accrual policy.
• Time tracking — it plans days; it doesn't audit hours.
• Enterprise scale — the swimlane view is honest because it's small. Past ten or so people, you want a resource-management product, not a clearer picture.

If you're one person, or your team already runs a heavyweight tool everyone genuinely keeps current, you don't need this — the win is one trusted picture, not a particular app.

A 60-second start

Open alldo.app and sign in with Google — you land in a sample board you can rearrange immediately. Add your teammates, drag in this week's real tasks, and mark known time off. By the first standup the board already answers the daily questions; the deeper habits — cutoff on Fridays, read-only link for your stakeholder, backlog for the overflow — arrive on their own within a week. It's free, with nothing to install, and it works as a PWA on your dock or phone.

Frequently asked questions