About a month ago, we added sub tasks functionality to the task management module to help teams better manage and complete their work much faster.
Fast forward to now, and we’re pretty excited with the uptake it has got among our customers. Along the same lines, we were bombarded with requests to have duration in hours for tasks / sub tasks. Hence we were forced to break ground on this due to the sheer volume of requests flooding our customer forums and tech support.
So we took these requests to heart and today we’re glad to launch THE much awaited duration in hours for tasks.
Just, go to Edit Profile under Portal Settings and select hours instead of days, save it and you’re done. Task duration in hours gets enabled for your project portal. It’s simple isn’t it?
Note: You must be the portal owner to enable this option for your. portal. And this feature is available only for Premium and Enterprise paid customers of Zoho Projects.
Let’s explore about task duration in hours in Zoho Projects
Starting today, duration in hours is available for all tasks, sub tasks and dependency view of a project. With this, work is broken down, tasks are identified, and estimates are specified for each task in hours which helps in calculating the exact time spent to accomplish your work each day.
Furthermore, we do support the various format for time entry i,e you can enter hours as 2:30 or 2.5 which gets automatically interpreted has 2 hours and 30 minutes.
Task duration is now included in resource utilization as well as gantt charts. Typically, durations can depend on the experience of the person who performs the task. For example, In a team, a highly skilled and experienced person can complete certain tasks much more quickly than a less experienced person. The ability to deploy employees effectively against projects enables project managers to better utilize and maximize employee productivity.
In addition, task duration in hours comes with a hidden benefit i,e when you allocate a task for certain hours, how much time it actually took to complete? what challenges did you encounter? how would you do it differently if you had to do it all over again the next time but complete it in much faster pace.
But that’s not all. With this latest update, we’ve enhanced the recurrence interval to accommodate additional time span like fortnightly, quarterly, half-yearly and yearly for recurring tasks.
The following user guide summarizes the steps to follow. For more details, please refer Task duration in hours.
We’re busy working on Projects 4.0 in providing the next generation user experience for you. You can get a sneak peek of this at https://forums.zoho.com/topic/what-s-keeping-us-busy-in-zoho-projects
Well, It’s up to you, give it a try and let us know how useful is duration in hours as comments here. We’re all ears… 
