Project management for interior designers, one week at a time

It is 8:45 on Monday and the senior designer is at the whiteboard, erasing the Riverside install, because the sideboard is still on the water. Two weeks became five, the white-glove crew is booked for a date that no longer exists, and the millwork shop wants to know whether the site is ready to receive. Behind her, four people are waiting to hear what they're doing this week, and she hasn't even reached the second project yet.

Project management for interior designers: six to eighteen months in a studio

A residential job moves through gates everyone recognises: initial consultation, signed letter of agreement, site measure, schematic design, design development, then the presentation that ends in approvals, and approval flips the work into procurement. The proposal gets paid, POs go out, CFAs come back for fabric sign-off, and then the waiting starts, because a domestic custom piece takes eight to sixteen weeks, a Belgian linen takes six months, and a hand-knotted rug has no fixed date at all until the loom finishes it. Meanwhile the GC, the painter and the drapery workroom run their own site rhythm, and punch items land as photos on a phone. That combination of long approval gates and unpredictable lead times is what makes project management for interior designers different from running a straightforward task list.

Five to eight jobs are live at once, each one at a different phase. Riverside is in procurement while Elmfield is still at schematic and Harbour View installs on Thursday, and your team presents concepts for one client the same week they install for another. Nobody has a dedicated project manager, because the senior designer is the project manager, and she is also specifying a kitchen and chasing a freight claim that usually gets blamed for the slip when really it was the client sitting on the CFA for nine days. The studio's work between presentations is keeping those clocks lined up so one late piece does not quietly move an install booked three months ago.

Rebuilding the whiteboard every Monday

Most interior design studios redraw the same picture every Monday. The studio meeting, the WIP, exists because nobody has a shared view of the week. So you walk every job out loud, and an hour later you have an answer that is going stale by Tuesday afternoon.

ToDoing puts that picture on one screen, where every task lives on a person and a day and the week itself is the unit you actually plan against, so the Overview grid can show the whole studio across the week, rows by people or rows by projects, and you drag tasks from one day or one person to another to reschedule. When Riverside slips, you pull the styling prep off Thursday and drop the Elmfield finish schedule into the gap, and everyone sees it in under a second. Each designer's My Week is the same data seen from their side, so the two views cannot drift apart. Anything unfinished rolls forward to today by itself each working day, so Friday's undone sample chase is already sitting on Monday's plan without anyone needing to retype it.

Install day sits on the same calendar as the work

Install day does not move, because the crew is already booked, the client has a flight built around it, and the photographer only has a tentative hold on the week after.

In ToDoing that date is a milestone, and milestones sit on the same grid as tasks, in the project's colour. The four days of pre-install prep and the install flag are visible in one glance, so when the prep starts bunching against the flag, the slip shows days early instead of on the morning itself. Put the CFA deadline and the presentation on that grid too and you feel approval pressure a week before it costs you the install date. Each project also carries a timeline and a workplan, as a list or a board, which is where the punch list lands after the walkthrough instead of in a chat thread.

The week the crew is booked and your senior is away

Half of install-week triage turns out to be a staffing problem, because someone is on leave, someone else is at another client's site measure, and the one person who actually knows the millwork drawings is unreachable.

On the Pro tier, leave sits on the same plan as the work, so time off can be booked in half days and sent to a single approver, with balances kept automatically and public holidays loaded by country and by region, which matters when your junior is working from another country. The team wall chart shows who is away the week the crew is booked. Subscribe to the leave feed from your own calendar, or mirror a leave calendar you already run elsewhere.

What interior designers get from tracking the design phase

Studios that bill design development hourly, or quote a flat fee and want to stop guessing, get two more things on the Enterprise tier. Ticking a task done logs its planned time automatically, with a one-tap adjust available per project, in days or hours, so there is no separate timer to start or timesheet to fill in afterward. Budgets show up as a burn bar, and the reports underneath it break down by person and by task type, while rates themselves stay visible to admins only.

Estimation reads your own finished work and gives a median and a p80 per task type, where the p80 is the number four out of five of those phases came in under, and the next concept phase then gets quoted from what the last four really took.

What ToDoing will not do for your studio

It does not hold an FF&E schedule, a product specification database, purchase orders, vendor acknowledgments, proposals with trade pricing and markup, invoicing, a client portal, CAD, or your sample library, and it does not track a PO either, because that is a different job from planning who does what this week. Studio Designer, Design Manager, Programa, Houzz Pro, Mydoma and DesignFiles do that job properly, and you should keep whichever one you run, while ToDoing takes over the Monday whiteboard and the who-is-doing-what spreadsheet instead.

Three questions studios ask

Is ToDoing good for a small interior design studio?

It fits a studio of roughly three to fifteen: a principal, one or two seniors, a couple of juniors, and a studio manager. Below three people, the whiteboard on the wall is still fine; past fifteen, you will likely want something with more procurement machinery built underneath it.

Can ToDoing replace Studio Designer or Programa?

No, and switching would cost you real functionality, because those tools handle specification, purchasing and client billing, while what ToDoing handles is only the calendar of people and days. Most studios end up running both, since the two are answering different questions about the business.

How do we handle lead times if ToDoing does not track orders?

Lead times stay in your order tracker, where the vendor acknowledgments are. What you put into ToDoing is the handful of dates that move people: CFA deadline, presentation, delivery window, install day. When the sideboard slips, you move that one milestone, the whole studio sees it in under a second, and you drag the affected prep tasks onto their new days in the same view.

If you are weighing other tools, ToDoing sits beside Asana, Monday.com, Float and Resource Guru, and there is a longer argument for planning the week rather than the backlog.

At the time of writing, July 2026, ToDoing is free for 3 people and 3 projects, Pro is $2 per person per month or $20 per person per year, and Enterprise is $6 per person per month or $60 per person per year. You can run the free plan without ever entering a card, and if you want to try Pro or Enterprise, a 14-day trial opens all of it.

Projects will still slip sometimes. What changes is that you usually see it a few days out, with time to rearrange the week, instead of finding out the morning the crew is meant to be on site.

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