How to manage non-project time

Manage non-project time (aka administrative time, office time, "keeping the lights on" time) for resources in one of two ways:

• Adjust the availability percentage in the resource's user profile
• Create a project to allocate “non-project” tasks

The answer for your team is based on:

1. How consistent your non-project hours are week to week or month over month
2. Do you want to manage non-project tasks in your organization?
3. What's the cost/benefit of managing to that level of detail vs the potential for great reports on the other side?

Adjust your Resource's availability

If you use this method, you set up your users and projects:

• Change the capacity percentage to how much of the resource's day should be project-time
• The resource will be over-allocated at a lower number of hours
• See more about User Capacity

Therefore, Project Insight will decrease the threshold for allocation. For example, if you say a resource is 50% Capacity Percent, then a 40 week will look over-allocated at 20 hours.

Create a project to allocate “non-project” tasks

Project Insight resource allocation reports provide information as to the availability of a resource across multiple projects.

Therefore, create a project to include those Administrative or Non-Project tasks. Plan for the Tasks called "send customer emails" for 22 days and allocated .5 hours a day. Therefore, the total work for that task would be 11 hours.

Assigning 100% allocation for “time-off” tasks allows project managers and/or project schedulers to control the resource availability reporting of those non-working days from the resource allocation reporting.

Just as you may overallocate resources for other types of tasks, you may overallocate resources for non-project tasks.

Whether the resource is overallocated based on other projects or because of non-project time, the project manager or scheduler must adjust the project schedule.

Best Practices for Managing Non-Project Time in Projects

If you have chosen to manage time off using the resources' user profile, you do not need to read this section.

If you have decided to use resource allocation to tasks for non-project time as the scheduling tool, you will want to review some “best practices.”

You may have decided to use the projects and non-project task assignments methods for one or more of the following reasons:

• Not all resource’s schedules are managed by the user manager
• You would like to see “non-project” tasks in resource allocation reports
• You would like to see a summary all non-project hours scheduled for a resource

Different resources may have non-project time managed and approved by different departmental managers, in which case you would want to set up an independent project for each department. For example, the Engineering department may have a project called “2025 Engineering Department Admin Tasks” with all of the engineering department personnel as resources. The department manager would be the Project Manager (the person controlling the schedule).

In this project resources list, Jack Stahl is the department manager. He is the project manager for the non-project tasks which will be scheduled for John Doe and Patrick Insight.


Jack Stahl can manage the non-project time by setting each resource as a summary task and then assigning all non-project time as tasks for the resource within the summary task at 100% allocation per task. In this example, you can see the specific dates that John Doe and Patrick Insight have as non-project time. Additionally, you can easily view the total hours of non-project time for 2025 for each resource at the summary task level.



When viewing resource allocation, the project name for the resource will be self-explanatory as to why the resource is unavailable. There is no need to drill-down for further detail to see that John Doe and Patrick Insight has non-project time for the weeks of Mar 16th and March 23rd.


Reporting at a higher level is also possible with some additional project planning. You may have several departments with separate managers scheduling their respective department non-project time. You could still see the non-project time reporting for all resources in a global report. You could use “Non Project Time” as a project type so that total time off reporting can be made company-wide by filtering task reports for only those tasks in the “Non Project Time” project type.