Patent ID: 8302009

Claim:
A method comprising: displaying, on a user interface, one or more representations of tasks and a calendar of dates, each representation being indicative of a task to be completed and an estimated time required for completing the task; receiving a user input indicative of a selected date from the calendar of dates; receiving a user input indicative of a selected representation of the one or more representations, wherein the selected representation corresponds to a selected task; assigning the selected date to the selected task, wherein the selected data is the date the task is scheduled to be performed; displaying on the user interface a list of employees scheduled to work on the selected date, and displaying on the user interface at least one generic employee representation, the generic employee representation being representative of an employee that is not on the list of employees scheduled to work on the selected date, wherein each entry in the list of employees includes at least a first field containing a number of hours the employee is scheduled to work on the selected data and a second field containing a number of hours the employee has been assigned to perform tasks on the selected date; receiving a user input indicative of the at least one generic employee representation from the list; assigning the at least one generic employee representation to the selected task; updating the second field of the selected at least one generic employee representation to include the estimated time required to complete the selected task; and assigning the generic employee representation to a specific employee not in the list of employees after the at least one generic employee representation is assigned the selected task, wherein the step of displaying one or more representations of tasks comprises displaying categories of tasks arranged by date, displaying a ratio of a number of tasks in each category that have been assigned to a total number of tasks in the respective category, and displaying a number of hours from a total number of hours needed to perform the tasks in the respective category that have been assigned.