Specific schedule for individual tasks?

While I’ve used OmniPlan very simply in the past, I’m now getting back into using it, and have some more complex and specific needs.

One thing I’d like to do is assign specific days of the week to individual tasks. Is this possible?

I searched the help, manual and the forums, but couldn’t find an answer. The closest I found was this old unanswered question, which sums up my query, primarily that user’s “Example 1”.

What if a task can only be done on a specific day of the week? In my case, the task itself can only be done on a weekend, even though the assigned resource (staff member) has availability on weekdays as well.

Thanks for any help or guidance!

After some more thought, I think I have a solution, though am happy to hear others’ input.

In my specific case, we are planning our house move, including looking for houses. I am interested in limiting our task of physically looking at houses to weekends or evenings, but keeping our availability more open for other tasks (eg, starting to purge and pack our belongings).

I believe the answer may be to create another resource - either staff (real estate agent) or equipment (open houses) - with a work schedule of weekends / evenings. Then I should be able to assign all resources - myself, my partner and the new resource - all to the task of “look at houses”, with a Resource Allocation setting of “Meeting”.

Does that sounds right to anybody?


For the OP in the post to which I linked above, she could possibly do the following in her examples:

– Example 1: Create a “supplier” resource that is only available on Thursdays.

– Example 2: Create a “carrier shipper” resource that is only available certain calendar days.


I am going to try working with this, and I certainly welcome any other thoughts or advice!


As to my original question, about assigning a schedule to an individual task, I’d still be curious about that. While, conceptually speaking, I suppose there is usually some external limit to a task (that can be created as a resource), I can also imagine just a desire to limit certain tasks to certain days.

What is the best way to do that? Am I even thinking about this correctly? 🤔

Yes, using a resource (or resources) with specified work schedules is the way to go generally.

You can of course set a start date/time for a task. So:

  1. View Houses - starts: 19 May 09:00, duration 10 hrs
  2. Review results of house viewings - is a successor to View Houses, duration 1 day

Or similar. Does that make sense. What you lose, of course, is auto rescheduling

@Nick - Thanks for the reply. Much appreciated! What you said makes sense, however when I try to set this up, I don’t seem to be getting the result I want/expect. Maybe I’m asking the wrong question.

I suppose my goal is to have the total task of “view houses” split itself as available over several weekends. Is that possible?

More accurately, my goal - and maybe this becomes a different question - is to determine how much time (based on weekend viewing) we have to look at houses, with a fixed end date to the whole process, including backing out certain other tasks. That is, say, very simply:

  • Deadline to “Move in” on August 31 (per end of our current lease)
  • 1 week before that = for house prep
  • 1 month before that = for contract negotiation
  • “look for houses” is a task scheduled between today and the start of contract negotiation - spread over weekends
  • the “look for houses” also shares resources (myself and my partner) doing other moving tasks (packing, etc)

I’ve tried setting up a project direction of “backward from fixed end”, plugging in this basic timeline, and adding three resources (myself, partner - with hours on weekdays and weekends - and real estate agent - with hours only on weekends).

But my “look for houses” task does not “fill in” the time between now and 5 weeks before August 31, let alone spread itself over all the weekends between now and then.

I thought the answer might be to make “look for houses” a hammock task, but I can’t seem to get that to even be an option.

Perhaps I’m thinking about this wrong, or missing something easy. I appreciate any further input. Thanks!