I would like a task to start at the beginning of the next day/week

[John Pollock]

In project, I would like to be able to specify that the task should start at
the beginning of the next day (or week or month or hour or whatever).

Due to resource allocations and such, sometimes a task is scheduled to start
in the last hour of a day, where in reality, the work will start the
beginning of the next day.

(As a side note, I often see tasks starting at 5:00 pm - and the calendar
indicates that working time is 8 to 5 - why ??)

In other cases, I want the work to span 5 days without a gap, so the start
time should begin on the following Monday at 8:00 am. While it is possible
to manually add lag time, if the preceeding task moves, the lag time must be
manually adjusted.

Thanks!!!

John

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[John]

In project, I would like to be able to specify that the task should start at
the beginning of the next day (or week or month or hour or whatever).

Due to resource allocations and such, sometimes a task is scheduled to start
in the last hour of a day, where in reality, the work will start the
beginning of the next day.

(As a side note, I often see tasks starting at 5:00 pm - and the calendar
indicates that working time is 8 to 5 - why ??)

In other cases, I want the work to span 5 days without a gap, so the start
time should begin on the following Monday at 8:00 am. While it is possible
to manually add lag time, if the preceeding task moves, the lag time must be
manually adjusted.

Thanks!!!

John

John,
This question or a variation of it has been asked multiple times in this
newsgroup. There are various ways to address it. Some of them are a
little more complex to set up but easy to use once they are set up while
others are straightforward to set up but not so convenient.

My personal preference is a VBA macro that examines all tasks and based
on certain criteria, moves the start of a successor task to the next
working day, week, month or whatever. This is a complex to set up but
easy to use method.

I also recall some schemes whereby a custom calendar is defined for a
milestone that only allows the milestone to start at certain times. The
predecessor drives the milestone and the successor "feeds" off the
milestone. This approach is fairly straightforward to set up but not
real convenient to use.

Try a search of past posts in this newsgroup for other ideas.

With regard to your side note. One reason is that Project stores and
calculates time in tenths of a minute. If a standard working day is 8
hours but certain conditions exist (e.g. work, resource assignments,
etc.) that cause the duration to be less than the full 8 hours (e.g.
479.9 minutes), the successor task will show a start time of 5:00 pm.
Remember, if duration is set for a display of hours, minute values may
be rounded.

John
Project MVP