Put the team's leave where the work is planned

On Monday morning a producer gives Leo a three-day job starting on Wednesday. On the planning board it looks fine, because Leo's Thursday and Friday are empty. They are empty because Leo is at a wedding in Mombasa, which his manager approved three weeks ago in the leave tracker. The producer planned with the information in front of them, and the information about Leo's week was in a different tool.

Most small teams have some version of this. A leave tracker, whether it is a spreadsheet, a shared calendar or a proper leave app, tells you who is away, and a planner tells you who is doing what, but on a Monday the question is who can take this job, which needs both. When the answers live in two places, somebody has to remember to check the second one, and on a busy morning they won't.

Where two systems go wrong

It usually shows up as small things. A task lands on someone's day off and they find it on Thursday night. A delivery date falls on a public holiday in one office and not in the other, so half the team plans to deliver on a day they won't be at work. The person who approves leave is often not the person who plans the work, so an approval never reaches the plan unless someone thinks to forward it.

In each case the plan has been drawn as though everyone works every working day, with the exceptions kept somewhere else. A planner that knows nothing about leave will always overstate what the team can do, and it overstates most in the weeks around the holidays, when the most people are off and the most deadlines are being squeezed in before the break.

What changes when leave sits on the plan

When time off is on the same calendar as the work, the exceptions are visible where the decisions get made. In ToDoing, leave is booked and approved under People, and once it is approved it appears on the planning views as well. The team grid shows the days each person is away, so Leo's Thursday and Friday stop looking free. Public holidays come in by country and region and are marked on the calendar, and each person can have their own holiday region, so a booking never charges someone for a day that is a holiday where they live.

The task form checks too. Give someone a task on a day they are on leave and it tells you so before you save, which is the moment the producer in the opening story needed. They would have seen it on Monday morning, with time to give the job to someone else or start it that morning instead.

Everyone can see their allowance, what they have taken and what is left. Requests go to a named approver, with a backup for when the approver is away themselves. Everyone can subscribe to their own leave from Google Calendar, Outlook or Apple Calendar, and admins to the whole team's, so the days also appear in the calendar people already check on their phones.

If you already have a leave tool

Some teams are happy with the leave tool they have, or their HR provider chose it for them, and there is no need to move. If the tool publishes a calendar link, as most do, paste it into ToDoing and the absences are mirrored onto the planning grid, read only. ToDoing matches each absence to a person by the name on the calendar event, so the names in the feed need to match the names in ToDoing. Booking and approving stay where they are, and the plan still knows who is away.

What it doesn't do

ToDoing is a work planner with leave built in, and it is not an HR system. It doesn't run payroll, hold contracts or build rotas for shift workers. Leave is counted in days and half days, so a team that needs leave in hours will want a tool made for that. For a small team planning project work a week at a time, which is the kind of planning we argued for in Plan the week, not the backlog, having leave on the same calendar as the work means nobody has to check two places before handing someone a job.

Leave is part of ToDoing Pro, at $2 per person per month, and every new workspace can try it free for 14 days.