Mandarin

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GO to Prototype & Manual

Dashboard

Projects

Tasks

To-do List

Task Allocations

Resources

User Manual

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One-line Summary

A lightweight Notion prototype for helping small teams forecast future workload, schedule pressure, and resource allocation before tasks become delayed or overloaded.

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Prototype

This prototype is a Notion-based scheduling and workload forecasting tool.

Rather than being a fully featured commercial product, it serves as a proof of concept that explores whether a Notion database can connect projects, tasks, task allocations, estimated effort, team capacity, and future workload into a practical planning system.

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Core Structure

The prototype consists of five primary databases and one integrated dashboard:

• Projects： Manage project information.
• Resources：Track team members and their available capacity.
• Tasks：Define high-level project tasks
• Task Allocations：Assign work to individual team members with estimated effort.
• To-do List：Capture miscellaneous tasks that don't require time estimation.
• Dashboard：Visualize project schedules, task allocation timelines, workload summaries, and task type analysis. </aside>

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Current Limitations

The current version relies on manual data maintenance, including assignees, execution periods, estimated hours, task status, and progress. As a result, the accuracy of the dashboard depends heavily on the quality of the input data.

It also does not currently support features such as automatic scheduling, task dependencies, critical path analysis, resource leveling, holiday-aware scheduling, or integrations with external project management platforms.

What This Prototype Is Not

This prototype is not intended to replace platforms like Jira, Trello, Asana, ClickUp, or Monday.com.

It is neither a complete task management system nor an enterprise-grade scheduling engine.

Instead, it is best described as a PM Planning Console :

A lightweight workspace that helps project managers quickly evaluate whether a project schedule is realistically achievable before execution begins.

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Key Features

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Feature 1 — Future Workload Forecast

The core purpose of this prototype is workload forecasting, not task tracking.

Based on each task allocation's execution period, estimated effort, progress, status, and assigned member, the system estimates every team member's workload over the next 7, 14, and 30 days.

This allows project managers to identify potential risks before execution begins:

• Who is likely to become overloaded?
• Which days have the highest workload?
• Are assignments unevenly distributed?
• Is the current schedule overly optimistic?

Rather than asking,

"Have all the tasks been created?"

the prototype asks,

"Is this schedule actually realistic?"

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Feature 2 — Task / Task Allocation Structure

The prototype separates work into two levels:

• Tasks — High-level project phases, modules, or work packages.
• Task Allocations — Individual pieces of work assigned to specific team members.

This distinction reflects how real projects operate.

A project's workload isn't created by the parent task itself—it's created by the individual responsibilities assigned underneath it.

For example, a single "Login UX Design" task may include:

• Requirement clarification by the PM
• User flow design by the designer
• Technical feasibility review by the engineer
• Test case validation by QA

Viewing only the parent task hides the true workload distribution. Breaking it into task allocations provides much better visibility into how work is actually shared across the team.

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