You’ve been using Toggl Plan – help shape Toggl Focus into an upgrade in every way

[Rasa]

Toggl Plan will move into Toggl Focus in the future – rebuilt to be faster, cleaner, and more powerful, with planning and time tracking finally working together, in one tool.

You’ve been using Toggl Plan, and your feedback is key.

Try out Toggl Focus (log in with your Toggl Plan details), import your Toggl Plan data (here’s how), and tell us what you think:

• Does this feel like an upgrade?

• What’s confusing? What’s missing compared to Toggl Plan?

• Would you feel confident fully switching from Toggl Plan?

We read every single piece of feedback and build directly from it. Thank you for helping us shape the best possible experience for you!

[Abby]

In response to this - for my particular usage, no, this doesn’t feel like an upgrade, it feels like a more complicated version of something that worked really well to begin with. I understand wanting to create a more powerful tool, but Toggl Plan was very easy to parse our schedule at a very quick glance, and I don’t feel that way with Toggl Focus at all. We’ll give it a try here to see how it works for us once we’re forced to switch over, but it’s possible that we may need to switch off of Toggl Focus for another kind of calendar.

That all being said, it looks like we still can’t add attachments to tasks, which is a make or break for us. We can’t switch over until attachments are able to be added, and if that aspect does not get included in feature updates, we’ll need to switch away from Toggl entirely.

[Chris1]

Very much dislike this and hope we won’t be forced to switch otherwise we’ll find another tool. We don’t need anything so granular with timings for each job.

I’ve now found Timeline view which is basically the same as the old one; I don’t know why all the tasks are so small but I guess I’ll get used to it. On the old version I like being able to grab/scroll left and right - the new version doesn’t have that much control.

How on Earth do I add a new task though? In the old version I just click where I want to add it, now that doesn’t work. Oh, I need to click “Add task” in the top left and put the date in manually. I also can’t right-click on the calendar. A disappointing step backwards.

[Hughie_Wilmshurst]

I feel it’s a starting point, but not an upgrade yet. There’s many features of toggl Plan that I like for convenience, which seem missing from toggl Focus. I definitely prefer the more grown-up look and feel of toggl Focus, but here’s some things I don’t like:

Timeline view, shows days and week number, but no month indicator unless it’s the 1st of the month. So if I’ve scrolled along, done some work, come back to it, great that I can see it’s the 28th but 28th of what??? I need to scroll left/right to find a month and then scroll back again.

Timeline view, the “current day” indication is very unclear - super easy to miss if you’re scrolling along. This should be made to stand out more.

In plan, I could click a spot in the timeline and create a task - in focus, it seems I need to click and drag - small difference, but super annoying.

Marking a task as “done” is now more convoluted - previously, I could right, click, hover over the status, and click “done”. Now I need to click to open it, then click the dropdown, then change the status - again seems minor, but takes up noticeably more time.

Time off - totally missing from focus, and it’s a feature I do use in plan.

Right click context menu simply not there - something it seems I used a lot in plan.

I’m sure there’s more, but I’ve only tried it for maybe 30 minutes thus far.

Looks really nice and grown up, but missing some features I really like from plan.

[Ryan]

This feels like a long-overdue upgrade for anyone wanting a more granular and organised approach to project and resource management. It finally puts Toggl in a position to compete more seriously with other systems out there,I really welcome the improvements.

I can understand why some users might feel unsettled if they prefer a purely resource-based timeline system, but personally, I’ve been hoping for more capability within Toggl Plan for a while now.

My first instinct is to ask about pricing and security, will the cost remain the same? And when importing, I noticed a message saying private tasks would be imported as public projects. Can you clarify if “public” means visible within the team or outside our organisation?

At the moment, the platform lacks visual hierarchy, key labels (like the current month and date markers) could stand out more. It all feels a bit flat and harder to scan through. That said, I do prefer the more sophisticated, grown-up aesthetic.

A few specific notes:

• In Week View, a sticky label showing the current month would help avoid confusion, and the current day/week could be highlighted more clearly.

• The “Share view” button feels overemphasised, it was one of our least-used features in Toggl Plan, so it might not need such prominence.

• Adding a task currently requires a click-and-drag; a single-click to add a new task would be faster and more intuitive.

• The ability to attach files to tasks or projects would be a big improvement.

• Time off tracking seems to be missing, this is an important part of our workflow as we use it to plan around annual leave.

• It would be great to input custom hex colours for clients and projects (some of ours have multiple brand variations). The current colour options are quite limited.

• The time estimate is currently defaulted to minutes, it would be handy if we could toggle between days/hours/minutes. if a task is across a few days it isn’t clear if this estimate is for the entire task, or 3 hours per day for example.

• The ability for custom status within the task itself would be helpful.

• I’d prefer tasks to be bigger on the timeline view, to help with scanning.

• Colour coding the priority status would be nice - again helpful for quick scanning.

• A “close project” action would be handy as well so you can filter through live/closed projects - with the ability to reopen in the future would also be nice.

• Finally, having a dedicated field to assign project codes to tasks and projects would help with internal organisation and reporting.

[marelle]

Don’t like it at all. Plan was okay to work with and to take a glance at the overall planning for the week, coming months even year. Just like a matrixboard for all our projects. Don’t want to switch, we cannot use Focus for our planning

[Matt_Smolens]

This is terrible. The simplicity of the Gantt chart functions was exactly what we have always loved about Plan. We don’t need all of these other functions. Make a separate product if you want to but don’t get rid of Plan. We will find another software if we’re forced to “upgrade”.

[joel]

Will Focus have an API like Plan does?

[Support]

Hi @joel thanks for asking!

Yes it will, we’re working hard on bringing that to you as quickly as possible.

[steve.green]

I deeply dislike Toggl Focus. We have been using the product since 2017, when it was called TeamWeek, and even back then it did everything we needed. We don’t need any of the new features, and they just make the interface more confusing and less usable. Worse still, some important features have been removed.

All these issues occur in Timeline view, which is the only view we use:

1. Most of our tasks are very short, often only a day. In Toggl Focus, only one letter of the label is visible if the task duration is an exact number of hours. Worse still, if the task duration is say 4h 30m, this is all that’s displayed - the task label is not visible at all.
2. We colour code all our tasks, but we can’t do that in Toggl Focus. It only allows us to set the background colour of the tasks to be the same as the project colour. However, we need tasks with different colours within the same project. This is absolutely essential and it’s a deal breaker if we can’t do it in Toggl Focus.
3. The project name is not displayed on the tasks. It is essential that we can see it because our Timeline contains dozens of short, but similar, tasks for different projects.
4. The Settings contain a list of public holidays, but I can’t see them displayed anywhere in the Timeline view. In Toggl Plan, they are represented by a vertical line so it’s obvious you should not assign any work that day.
5. In Toggl Focus, you can add a milestone, but it is only represented by a tiny symbol. In Toggl Plan, it’s represented by a vertical line, which is exactly what we need (usually to fix the fact that Toggl gets UK public holiday dates wrong every year). In Toggl Focus, a vertical line is displayed when hovering over the tiny symbol, but this is of no use.
6. The Projects page uses infinite scroll. This is insane - to quote Nielsen Norman, the UX experts, infinite scroll should only be used for time-wasting activities like social media, not for goal-oriented activities. We have hundreds of sequentially numbered projects and it takes about a minute to scroll down to the most recent one.
7. Apparently, it is not possible to add a task by clicking on the relevant place in the Timeline. Instead, you need to click the Add Task button and select both the assignee and the start date. In Toggl Plan, these are automatically selected based on where you clicked in the Timeline, which saves a lot of time and reduces the chance of error.
8. In Toggl Plan, a task’s right-click menu contains all the things you typically want to do, such as deleting and duplicating. Everything is in close proximity, so it’s barely necessary to move the mouse. But in Toggl Focus, a giant overlay opens when you click a task, so you have to move the mouse a long way. Then you need to click the “three dots” button to get at most of the features, so that’s an extra click as well as reducing discoverability for people who are not so familiar with the product.

I have spent enough time on this, but I am sure I could add a lot more issues if I spent longer. Some of these individual issues are showstoppers for us. In combination, some of the less serious ones become showstoppers too.

Please keep Toggl Plan available. No need for any updates - just leave it as it is and launch Toggl Focus in parallel for those who want it. If you don’t it’s almost certain we will cancel our subscription.

[Support]

Thank you (and everyone else) for all the feedback you shared. This is exactly what our product team needs to make Focus an upgrade compared to Plan.

That said, there’s no need to worry. We won’t make Plan unavailable anytime soon. Currently, migration to Focus is entirely voluntary. The Focus app is still in beta and is being actively improved based on user feedback. We appreciate it very much!

[alodafo]

I too think that the new Focus is way to advanced. When we started using Togglplan (or Teamweek as the name was back then), it was just because it was so simple and intuitive, exactly what we needed for planning our projects and resources, with an extremely good overwiew. This new Focus makes everything harder, much more clicks to archieve the simple solution we are looking for.

Don’t make the mistake of over-engineering, the simplicity of TogglPlan is exactly what we are in need of.