Thanks for the very informative reply. It did the trick! But...again for some reason I wasn't completely up-front with what I am trying accomplish. Here is what I'm trying to do. I have a task that will take 2 hours of my employee's time, but will take 2 weeks to complete (since my client has to review/send comments/etc). In MS Project, I would like to track the 2 hours my employee works (including costs), as well as track the 2 week duration, for scheduling purposes.

Here is what I have done, and the issue I am encountering. I have added my employee to the project as a resource. I have also added the task in-question, at a duration of 2 weeks. Per your instructions, I allocated 2 hours of my employee to this task without issue. But my issue arises when I try to add a second similar task. This second task is identical to the first (duration, resource allocation, etc), except for a different task name. When I add this second task, I am met with an overallocation warning for my employee resource, in both tasks. Why would there be an overallocation warning here, and how can I address it? Surely in-practice the same employee can easily carry out both of these tasks, since they both require only 2 hours of his time, while spread out over a duration of 2 weeks? Perhaps I am misunderstanding something. edit: the overallocation warning remains until I alter start dates of the task until there is no overlap between them.

I have also considered adding lag to various tasks to account for waiting on the client. But lag can only be applied to the project if the task in-question is a predecessor to another task. That is not always the case with my project.

Sorry for the miscommunication. I thought that asking these very specific questions would be more efficient than one broad involved question. If you want, I can start a new topic with these latest questions.

Thanks.