I have many tasks where the overall time taken is greater than the effort needed to complete them.

Consider this example:


My friend & I are busy people working on several different projects but we want to only spend 80% of our available time on them leaving 20% for other stuff.


Our latest project is to build an aquarium for my flat. The time taken from working out what I want to sitting back and enjoying is 8 calendar weeks. My friend is mentoring me and has said that amount of time he needs to spend on the project is 2 days and I will need to spend 1 week on the project in total, the rest of the time is waiting for weed & fish etc. to get settled.


He has given me a list of stuff to do and waiting times in between so I have a good idea of what I’m doing.


His time however is not so well defined; there is 0.5 day at the start then the remaining 1.5 days is spread over the rest of the project.

Questions

1. How best to show my friend’s 1.5 day allocation over the rest of the project without going into minute detail.
2. I tried using my resource pool to show that we were only 80% available but with most of our projects that showed we were over allocated; the reality is that in busy periods we devote 100% to projects and gain our 20% non-project time back when we are slack. So the 80% rule in the resource planner seems to be too inflexible. Would I be better creating a Non-project time project so that I can allocate non –project time and reschedule /reduce it like any other project?

As always any help or advice is greatly appreciated


Tony