[Lizard]

OK, there's a number of options.

1) Setting a "workload" key in the custom data panel of the task and giving it the "40" value. However, I can't display the key "workload" as a column in the task outline window.

Actually, you can do this. In fact, when you create a new custom data column, it should automatically be added to the task outline view. It should also appear in the column list in the view options pane (command-j) so you can add or remove it whenever you want. If for some reason this isn't happening, please email us to report this bug! However, I'm not sure this will be what you want. If your 40 hours is only in a custom data column, you won't be able to leverage OmniPlan's scheduling tools to balance your work across the total time (resource leveling).

Here's how I would proceed:
1) In the calendar tab, customize your work hours so that they reflect the hours that you'll typically work on your thesis each week. More importantly, the total number of hours in those green boxes should match the total number of hours you expect to work on your thesis each week. (This assumes your thesis is the only work in this plan; if you add all your other classwork as tasks, you should adjust this to have time for all that too.) Then go to the project formatting inspector and make sure the hours/week are correct there too.

2) OmniPlan does not (yet) have a way to interrupt one task with another task, so if you want the plan to show that you'll work on research for 2 hours, then go do interviews for 2 hours, then come back and do another hour of research, you'll need to break "research" and "interviews" down into several separate tasks. You could break research down into topics, or just say "1 hour of research" for each task and make them all 1 hour long. The interview tasks could specify who you plan to interview, or again just be generic "do one interview" tasks. You should put these all into task groups labeled "research" and "interviews"

3) Create milestones for your deadlines (final draft, outline, etc.). Because those are external, immovable dates, you should lock them. Locking says "OmniPlan, no matter what rescheduling you are doing, do not change these dates." Then, if something else pushes tasks out past the milestones they need to be finished for, OmniPlan will display a violation (the icon is kind of like a stop sign).

4) Select all the research tasks and click the "connect" button in the toolbar to create a chain of finish->start dependencies between them.

5) Create a finish->start dependency from your tasks to any milestones they have to be finished for. For example, you might have an "Outline due" milestone, and you want to get 30 hours of research and your outline written before that. So create a dependency from the 30th "1 hour of research" task to that milestone, and another from the "draft outline" task to the same milestone.

6) Maybe you have a meeting with your advisor. You can put that as a task on your project too. If you already have an exact date/time, set those and lock them. (Again, because it's an external schedule.) If you know it will be sometime in the week of April 14-18, create the task, set the duration, but don't set the dates. Then in the task inspector, set the start constraint date to April 14 and the end constraint date to April 18. Then you can create dependencies to that task as well.

7) You can also use a constraint (or a locked milestone with a dependency) to make sure you get all your research done in a month. If you put a "research finished" milestone on April 20 inside your "Research" group, then the group will automatically stretch to include that date and look 1 month long. If you collapse this group (the triangle to the left of the task), it will just look like a single month-long task and you don't have to show anyone else the details of all the individual hours of research.

I think I wandered a bit beyond your questions, but I hope this was helpful. While writing this, I started making an example of what I'm talking about. If it would be valuable to you, please send an email to omniplan@omnigroup.com asking for the file (and link to this post, so I know what file you're talking about!) and I'll send that to you.