What is effort?

Effort is a value that expresses the estimated quantity of work described on this card. What the value specifically means is up to you and your team. You can use it to represent time units like hours or days or you use it to represent more relative units like story points. Together with priority it is the backbone of your scope management.

In our experience the first one (time units) is easier to grasp for new teams. Here’s a quick reasoning for using the latter (relative units): let’s assume you estimate a task to take 5 hours and let’s assume over time you amass dozens of tasks. As you get better at these, the time required to do similar tasks usually goes down. After working on the project for a couple of months, a task that initially required 5 hours to complete might now only need 3 hours. This means that your estimates can go out of sync and that you have to update them regularly.

The idea behind using relative measures is to keep the estimate for tasks somewhat fixed. Let’s say you measure animating your standard Orc enemy in the game as 1 point and measure all other enemies relative to that. As you get better at animating, you won’t have to update your estimates but instead plan for completing more points. Bumping up your personal work estimate per week is much easier than updating a backlog of many cards.

This also makes it easier to share effort estimates. Your senior animator might plan for 25 weekly points and the junior animator for 15 weekly points, without having to update individual card estimates based on who is working on it.

Having said that, it can be hard to establish even for experienced teams, as we’re all human and have a natural tendency for using time based metrics. In either case we let you choose which model you prefer :)

Assigning effort

Effort picker

Open the properties sidebar by clicking on the top button to the right of an opened card. You may also click on the effort number and it will open the sidebar and highlight the effort input field.

You can click on the numbers to set the effort to the corresponding number. You can also use the input field to enter any number manually.

Cool shortcut: Hovering your mouse pointer over the effort area of any card and pressing a number keyboard button will set the effort to that. This works on both - the mini cards and also opened cards.

As with most other properties you can also update cards by dragging and dropping them into the corresponding swim lane if your current view is sorted by effort.

Finally there’s the Quick Settings to modify the effort amongst other card properties.

Effort Scales

Changing effort scales in the organization settings

You can customize the default effort numbers by going into your organization settings and choosing from..

Linear (0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10)
Fibonacci (0,1,2,3,5,8)
Exponential (0,1,2,4,8,16)

This comes down to a matter of taste. You may also use the input field to enter any number (including those outside of the scale) manually.

You can use the bulk action bar to set the effort on multiple cards at once. By default new cards don’t have any effort assigned yet, unless the Deck’s Template Card sets one.

Using effort

Accumulated effort shown in a swimlane

Make sure you populate this field to enjoy all the project metrics we offer.

We also show effort on top of a lot of the swim lanes that split cards between sorting dimensions. For example: if you choose to sort your cards by owner, you’ll see an effort tracking label next to each user name. The label has the format D / N (M).

N is the sum of all card efforts in this section; cards without an effort count with the fallback value. D is the part of N on cards that are already done and is left out while it is 0. M is the number of cards in this section which don’t have any effort associated, and is left out while it is 0. A Hero Card brings the effort of its sub cards along, and archived, deleted and Doc cards don’t count. We generally advise to use efforts everywhere, including setting cards to zero effort if they are negligible.

Another way to quickly add up effort points is to use the selection feature. The effort icon in the bulk selection header will also show the summed up effort of selected cards. (Once you’ve selected the first card, clicking other cards adds them to the selection.)

Clicking on the effort icon will open the quick settings, which allow you to quickly set priority, effort, deck and owner of a card.

Hero Cards

Hero cards automatically add up the effort of all their contained sub cards, counting sub cards without effort with the fallback value. You may add a custom effort for the hero card itself, which is added on top.

Fundamentals

Card Basics

Organizing Cards