[homagetogorto]

Gavin,

That's exactly the kind of thing I need, and what I'm hoping that the rumored integration with OmniPlan will address. The basic question for me is always, "Given the work I currently have, when can I start and finish this new project?" -- in other words, what date can I promise it to the client? Or "Given the immovable date on this new project, which other projects do I have to shuffle around?"

Problem is, I don't work on monolithic projects with a herd of PMPs managing all these dates for me. I've got dozens of smaller projects (2-200 hours) always on the go, and despite years of searching, I've never found any software that can do this effectively. Ultimately, I put together a very crude system of my own for this. Essentially, it takes all my work, spreads out the hours for each task between its start and end dates, and tells me how many hours I would need to work each day/week to finish everything by the dates I gave it. So if it says I'll need to work 170 hours next week, I know some dates have to move. That also tells me how far ahead I'm booked, so if new work comes in, I know I can't start it until February.

Having the graph in real time would be hugely beneficial.

At a minimum, if I could periodically pull my projects from OmniFocus into OmniPlan, work out the scheduling, then push the updated dates back into OmniFocus, that would help a lot.

(And who knows, maybe all I need is OmniPlan and not OmniFocus. I tried this in MS Project once but it failed miserably. I haven't spent much time with OmniPlan yet. It crashed after 10 minutes of use, so I'm going to wait for the Leopard version.)