Your First Schedule
Get from zero to a plan of record in about 5 minutes. By the end of this tutorial, you will have a project with goals, tasks, team members, and a plan showing assignments, timeline, and cost for everything that ships.
Try the sample project first
When you create your organization, Plenar provisions a sample project — Inventory App v1 — with goals, milestones, tasks, team assignments, and availability already configured. You can explore the timeline, preview changes, and see how continuous planning works before creating your own project.
Open it from your dashboard and try:
- Timeline — see how tasks are laid out across the calendar with dependency lines
- Scope Table — edit an estimate or reassign a task, then check the Schedule panel for the preview diff
- Schedule panel — review the impact of your change, then Apply or Discard
The sample project is fully functional. You can add tasks, change priorities, log time off, and see the schedule recompute. When you are ready to start your own project, continue below.
1. Create an account and organization
Sign up at dashboard.plenar.app. You will be prompted to create an organization — this is the top-level container for your team and projects.
2. Create a project
Click New Project from your dashboard. You need two things:
| Field | Required | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| Name | Yes | Identifies the project. Pick something your team will recognize. |
| Start date | Yes | The earliest date work can be scheduled. Nothing will be placed before this date. |
| End date | No | Used for timeline visualization. Work can extend beyond this date if needed. |
From Claude Code (MCP)
If you have already connected Claude Code, you can create a complete plan in one conversation:
"Set up a new plan for our payment processing migration. We need:
- Goal: PCI compliance (P0, due June 1) with milestones for tokenization and audit
- Goal: Stripe integration (P1, due July 15)
- Tasks: implement card tokenization (5d), audit logging (3d), Stripe webhook handler (4d)"Claude shows you a schedule preview and waits for your approval before applying.
3. Add your team
Go to Settings > Team in your project and add members from your organization. Each member needs to be assigned to the project before Plenar can schedule work for them.
Plenar uses each member’s availability (weekdays by default, minus any time off) and optionally their skills when auto-assignment is enabled. See Invite Your Team for details.
4. Define a goal
Goals are your business objectives — the things that have deadlines. From the Scope tab, click Add Goal and set:
- Title — “Launch authentication”, “Ship v2 API”
- Priority — P0 (Critical) through P4 (Minimal). Plenar enforces P0-P2 deadlines aggressively. P3-P4 are scheduled for efficiency only.
- Target date — when you need it done. Plenar will try to meet it, but will still produce a valid schedule if it cannot.
5. Add tasks with estimates
Tasks are the atomic units of work. Each task needs at minimum a title and an estimate (in working days). From the Scope Table, click Add Task under your goal or milestone.
For each task, set:
- Estimate — effort in working days. A 3-day task takes 3 working days of a single person’s time.
- Assignee — who will do it. Leave blank if you want Plenar to auto-assign (requires auto-assignment enabled in settings).
- Scope — Must (required, always scheduled) or Nice (optional, may be dropped if capacity is tight).
- Dependencies — tasks that must finish first.
6. See your plan
As soon as you have tasks with estimates and assigned team members, Plenar recomputes your plan automatically. You will see a preview in the Schedule panel showing assignments, timeline, and any warnings.
Review the change impact preview — it shows task dates, goal ETAs, and any warnings (missing estimates, skill mismatches, deadline risks). Click Apply to commit this as your plan of record.
That is it. You now have a plan that respects dependencies, availability, and priorities.
Structuring your plan
A well-structured plan gives Plenar better data to work with:
Goals
Goals are business objectives. They answer “what are we trying to accomplish and by when?”
- Set a target date if there is a real deadline. Plenar uses this to prioritize work.
- Set a priority (P0-P4) to tell Plenar how important this deadline is relative to others.
- Goals without target dates are still useful for grouping. Plenar will compute an ETA based on the tasks inside.
Milestones
Milestones group tasks within a goal. They represent intermediate deliverables.
- Milestone dates are computed, not set. The ETA is the latest end date of all tasks assigned to the milestone.
- Milestones can optionally have target dates, which act as intermediate deadlines.
- Skip milestones for small goals with fewer than 5 tasks — they add structure without much value.
Dependencies
Dependencies tell Plenar that one task cannot start until another finishes. A few rules:
- Must-have tasks cannot depend on nice-to-have tasks. Nice-to-have items might not be scheduled, so they must never block required work.
- Avoid unnecessary dependencies. Each dependency constrains what schedules are possible. Only add one if the work genuinely cannot start without the predecessor.
- Circular dependencies make the schedule infeasible. Plenar will report an error if it detects a cycle.
Project settings that matter
After creating a project, configure these in Settings:
| Setting | Default | Why it matters |
|---|---|---|
| Auto-assignment | Off | When on, Plenar assigns unassigned tasks based on skills and capacity. |
| Scheduling template | Deadline Driven | Controls secondary priorities. “Throughput” minimizes total duration. “Team Balanced” distributes work evenly. “Quality First” maximizes skill matching. |
| Capacity buffer | 10% | Inflates estimates to provide margin for estimation error without requiring you to pad each task. |
| Lead time | 5 days | Tasks within this window resist rescheduling. Prevents imminent work from being moved. |
See Settings for the full reference.
What to do next
- Connect Claude Code — Manage your plan from the terminal
- Dashboard Views — Learn the full UI: timeline, scope table, schedule panel
- How Scheduling Works — Understand how Plenar recomputes your plan