Forum Discussion
Help with Task Duration: Start Finish vs Actual Time worked.
Welcome to the "wonderful world of Project". Let me start by explaining the difference between time span (duration) and effort (work). In Project duration is the time span in working days between the start of a task and the finish of a task. Work is the effort one or more resources expends to complete the task.
In your example it sounds like you want a fixed duration type task. It's not clear if the work estimated to do the task was 2 hours or if after all was said and done it only took 2 hours to do the task. Let's assume you estimated the task would take 5 hours for Joe to complete the task. There are various ways to set this up. Here is one way. Joe is initially assigned at 100% (full time) which gives a total work content of 88 hours.
But since the estimated work is 5 hours, edit the Work field to reflect that. Note that because it is set up as a fixed duration task, Joe's daily work changes to 0.45 hrs per day.
The task is complete and it only took 2 hours instead of the estimated 5 hours. So add a couple more columns to the view, Actual Work, Remaining Work and % Work Complete. So, we enter the actual work and since the task is complete we also enter the remaining work.
Scheduling with all tasks as fixed duration is unusual, normally the goal is to let the plan unfold dynamically. For example, finishing a task early saves schedule time or finishing late delays the plan.
Hopefully, this gives you some idea of how it all works.
John