When you add a checklist item to a card, the effort attribute from the items is automatically added to the card. This means you can visualize a coherent effort for the card and easily calculate the effort on tasks and subtasks.

This can also be applied to dates, members and actual effort.

In the example below, a card has a duration of 4 days. This is because it starts early on Dec 6 and ends late on Dec 9. As duration and effort are linked as default, the effort is also 4 days, because one person would usually take this time to work on the card:
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However, looking at its 3 checklist items, which could be understood as tasks to complete the card, each of them takes 2 days to complete, even though their overlap allows finishing in 4 days. For this reason, one could argue that the effort should be 6 days, as demonstrated in the Gantt chart below:

If this is the expected behavior for this board, you can open the Board settings, Planning tab, and enable “Aggregate checklist items on card level”.

Note: This option must be enabled previous to planning the checklist item efforts. Enabling it later will not recalculate all the current effort.

The logic of effort from checklist items being rolled up to the cards in a bottom-up way also applies when you use parent/child relations to plan work.

The image below shows that task A.1 has now been broken down to two subtasks, A.1.1 and A.1.2, each with 2 days of effort. This made the effort on A.1 go from 2d to 4d. Consequently, the effort in A went from 6d to 8d.

This feature is designed to make it easier for you to track and measure task effort in Placker. We hope this feature helps make your Placker experience even better. As always, please don’t hesitate to reach out if you have any questions or feedback.

Happy Placking!