Project management for creative agencies, week by week

It is 8:47 on Monday and the studio manager has the resourcing sheet open with last week still in it. The packaging client sent round-two amends at 6pm on Friday, so Tuesday and Wednesday now belong to artwork that should have been signed off. The brewery pitch has moved to Thursday. Two designers are standing by the kettle waiting to hear what they are on, and the creative director has just asked whether the studio can take the website job. The sheet says yes, but it has not been touched since last week, so by now it is wrong.

Two engines, one set of designers

Project management for creative agencies mostly comes down to getting Monday right. Most studios under about 15 people run projects and retainers side by side, and the two compete for the same hands. A project arrives with a brief and a costed estimate broken into stages, immersion, concept with two or three routes, design development, artwork, delivery, with two rounds of amends baked into the number, and the concept presentation is the hinge everything turns on: internal crit, then the client deck, then a wait for feedback that comes back late and split across four emails from three people who disagree.

Retainers keep a different clock: an agreed number of days each month, spent against a rolling backlog of social assets, pack tweaks and sales decks, tracked through a WIP call and a burn report at month end. Requests land by email and WhatsApp all day and get triaged by whoever runs traffic, so the studio ends up planning in weeks, who is on what, each day, decided Monday morning by the creative director and the studio manager, and half undone again by Wednesday because a client moved.

In ToDoing a task lives on a person and a day. Everyone sees their own days in My Week, and the studio sees the whole team on one Overview grid, rows by person or by project. They are the same data seen two ways, so a change the studio manager makes shows up the moment a designer opens her own week.

Monday traffic without rebuilding the resourcing sheet

Drag a task from Tuesday to Thursday, drag it from one designer to another, and it moves for everybody in under a second while the meeting is still running. Projects carry their colour everywhere, so a row that belongs to one client reads as a single colour, while a designer juggling three brands at once sees all three of them laid out across her Thursday.

Anything not finished rolls forward to today by itself each working morning, so nobody has to re-type Friday's leftovers into Monday. Work with no date yet sits in a Someday column until the week has room for it, which is where most retainer backlog belongs until it is promised.

When "tiny change to the deck" hits a concept deadline

A retainer client WhatsApps at 11am with a small tweak needed by 3pm, and the only designer who knows that brand is heads-down on a concept presentation due tomorrow. Right now that collision happens in someone's head, or in a WhatsApp thread nobody reads until the concept is late.

Put the tweak on her Wednesday, next to the concept work, and the collision shows up on the grid itself, because both jobs are now sitting on the same day for the same person, with a milestone flag on the same calendar as the tasks. Milestones live beside the work rather than in a separate plan, so a concept date or a print deadline shows the pile-up days before it becomes an evening. Slip a date and everything sitting behind it is visible on the same grid, so moving it all again takes a drag each rather than the usual morning of back-and-forth messages.

Resource planning for a creative agency in a peak week

Peak weeks need an artworker or a motion freelancer, and the booking decision depends on a question studios often cannot answer on Wednesday: what does next week look like? Scroll the Overview forward and you can see it laid out for each person, day by day. Book the freelancer as an ordinary seat and they get their own My Week, the same view everyone else has.

Leave, on Pro, is what covers the rest of the staffing gap, with half days, one approver, balances, public holidays by country and region, a team wall chart, and calendar feeds in and out if the studio already keeps time off somewhere else. The senior designer's Friday off is already in the plan three weeks before it happens, so there is time to work around it while it is still easy.

Where the extra rounds go

It is easy for round two of amends to quietly turn into round four, and often the creative director only finds out when someone adds up the days at delivery. On Enterprise, ticking a task done logs its planned time automatically, with a one-tap adjust, in days or hours per project, against a budget with a burn bar, which means there is no timer to remember and no timesheet to chase down on Friday. The by-person and by-type report tells you where the retainer went, and it exports to CSV for the month-end reconciliation. Estimation reads your own finished work and gives a median and a p80 per task type, which you can print as a client quote. The accuracy view compares what was promised at the estimate stage with what the work actually took, and rates stay visible to admins only.

What ToDoing will not do for a studio

It does not invoice or reconcile a retainer: that stays in Xero, QuickBooks, or an agency suite like Streamtime. It does not run billable-hour timesheets or produce an hourly invoice line, so a studio that bills by the hour keeps Harvest or Toggl alongside it. Proofing and artwork markup are not here at all, so amends rounds stay in Figma comments, Ziflow or a marked-up PDF. There is no client portal, because clients never log in to ToDoing, and everyone inside the workspace sees the whole plan, freelancers included; there is no DAM, no version control, and no new-business CRM either. ToDoing's job is to plan the week the studio works in, not to replace any of the specialist tools above.

Questions studios ask

What is the best project management software for a small creative agency?

Pick the one that matches how you actually decide the week. ToDoing was built for teams of 3 to 15, where the person holding the spreadsheet is the traffic function, and it replaces that spreadsheet rather than adding a system on top of it. Much past 15 people you usually have a full-time producer, and the tooling that makes sense changes too.

How do small agencies plan traffic without a full-time producer?

The studio manager or the creative director usually runs it, on a Monday, in a spreadsheet. Freelancers are ordinary seats, billed per person per month, so a crunch month costs a few dollars more. At the time of writing, July 2026, Pro is $2 per person per month or $20 a year, Enterprise $6 per person per month or $60 a year.

Do we still need Float or Resource Guru?

If your studio schedules in hours against utilisation targets, those tools go deeper. ToDoing plans in days, a task on a person on a day, and keeps the plan next to the actual work, which is what most studios under 15 people are doing on the whiteboard anyway. Read ToDoing vs Float and ToDoing vs Resource Guru for the honest split, or plan the week, not the backlog for the thinking behind it, since whichever tool you land on, someone at the studio is still remaking that Monday traffic call by hand.

ToDoing also works for accounting firms, architects, consulting firms, engineering consultancies, event planners, interior design studios, law firms, pr agencies, recruitment agencies, software studios, video production.