If you’ve ever felt like managing multiple projects is like spinning plates while riding a unicycle, you’re not alone. Whether you’re a Jira project management pro, a team lead, or a solo contributor involved in more than one project, the constant switching, prioritizing, and tracking can become overwhelming fast.
That’s where project management software like ActivityTimeline steps in—not just to track tasks, but to bring structure to the chaos and clarity to the big picture.
Top 10 Best Practices of Managing Multiple Projects
#1. Prioritize What’s Urgent with Multi-Project Visibility
When your tasks are buried across different Jira boards, it’s easy to lose track of what really matters. The urgent items blend in with the routine, and priorities become murky. ActivityTimeline consolidates multiple Jira projects into a single, unified view. Instead of flipping through tabs, you get instant visibility of all the moving pieces.
With visual heatmaps, tasks are color-coded by urgency, deadlines, or workload. This at-a-glance insight makes it easier to identify critical tasks and align resources accordingly. You can also create custom views to spotlight high-priority items across various projects, ensuring you never miss a major milestone or critical task.
#2. Time Block Like a Pro with Individual & Team Calendars
It’s easy to plan for focus, but reality often looks like a series of interruptions. With ActivityTimeline, both team and personal calendars are interactive. You can drag and drop tasks into specific time slots, visually planning your day or week.
Conflicts become visible to ensure you don’t double-book, while automatic calendar sync with public holidays and personal events helps maintain realistic schedules. This visual approach to time management allows for intentional deep work, even when you’re managing multiple projects simultaneously.
#3. Create Space for Deep Focus
When your attention is split between five different projects, context switching eats away at productivity. With ActivityTimeline’s workload indicators, it becomes easier to prevent overload and focus on one project at a time. You can visualize each day’s schedule in detail, helping reduce distractions from other tasks that aren’t urgent.
The ability to filter out non-essential projects or tasks allows you to minimize visual clutter, enabling focused work without losing sight of the larger goals. This balance between clarity and focus is essential when you’re dealing with more than one project at once.
#4. Weed Out Your Workload
Sometimes the problem isn’t just too much work—it’s not knowing which tasks are dragging the timeline. ActivityTimeline allows you to compare estimated vs. actual time spent on tasks across all projects. This insight is critical for spotting bottlenecks and identifying tasks that need reassignment or reconsideration.
Its backlog management board helps you declutter timelines by pushing non-essential tasks out of view while keeping everything accessible. This makes it easier to streamline processes and keep teams aligned on what matters most.
#5. Delegate Smarter with Team Capacity Insights
One of the most common mistakes when managing several projects is assuming everyone has the same bandwidth. ActivityTimeline offers real-time visibility into team capacity, showing exactly who is overbooked and who has room to take on more. You can see users workload and availability right on the timeline, while each user card contains the number of hours they’re available each month, their skills, position, etc.
Using capacity bars and visual indicators, you can delegate tasks more effectively and prevent burnout. When someone’s schedule is underutilized, you’ll see it instantly—allowing for better resource allocation across the team. Using built-in custom reports you can achieve even more granular view of capacity and availability across your teams and sort them by projects.
#6. Overlay All Projects for Strategic Planning
It’s tough to manage project B if you don’t know what’s happening in project A. Overlaps in project timelines can lead to missed deadlines, duplicated effort, and confusion. ActivityTimeline gives you a panoramic view of all active projects, team commitments, and upcoming milestones.
This high-level overview reveals hidden conflicts and opportunities for optimization. You can layer milestones and deadlines from several projects onto one calendar and adjust as needed. Whether you’re dealing with overlapping launches or planning a new project, this kind of visibility is invaluable.
#7. Track Your Progress Automatically
Time tracking becomes a daunting task when juggling multiple projects. ActivityTimeline simplifies this with built-in worklogs that automatically track hours spent on each task, per project. No more spreadsheet nightmares — just clean, consistent tracking.
For example, weekly and monthly progress reports can be generated, giving stakeholders an executive summary of current tasks, productivity trends, and overall project status.
#8. Know What’s Flexible (and What’s Not)
Not all deadlines are created equal. Some can move — others can’t. With ActivityTimeline, you can assign hard deadlines and dependencies that alert you when related tasks are off track. If a non-moveable milestone is at risk, you’ll know in advance.
Buffer zones can be added for key deliverables, giving your team space to absorb minor delays without derailing the entire schedule. This makes managing expectations easier and improves your ability to identify potential risks early on.
#9. Stay Organized with Custom Views and Filters
Disorganization is a silent killer in multi-project environments. ActivityTimeline lets you customize views for each team role. Designers, developers, and managers all get tailored views that highlight the data and tasks most relevant to them.
You can also create saved filters for recurring project types or preferred reporting formats, helping you maintain consistent communication and workflow habits across the board. With this level of control, managing different projects no longer feels like starting from scratch each time.
#10. Manage Expectations with Timesheets Reports
Stakeholders want updates—and they want them regularly. ActivityTimeline makes creating reports painless. With just a few clicks, you can generate sharable reports that display team progress, bottlenecks, and key insights about the project’s status. You can filter by team member, specific project, or sprint, offering both big picture and granular insights.
You can also generate timeline and detailed views based on your Jira timesheets for even more granular view. By clicking on the Columns button located at the top right corner of the view, you can add Jira Custom Fields to your report. You can also rearrange the columns to suit your preferences. Simply drag and drop the columns to create a layout that best fits your workflow.
These reports are ideal for sprint reviews, retrospectives, and executive meetings. They help you communicate expectations clearly and ensure all stakeholders are informed and updated without the need for repetitive emails or manual summaries.
How to Build Multiple Projects Calendar with ActivityTimeline
ActivityTimeline enables users to set up accurate and transparent strategies for both short-term objectives and more extended aspirations. It facilitates the allocation of task workloads and offers real-time progress tracking.
The app's Planner looks like a calendar where you can display issues within a different scope (days, or week scope). It provides a timeline view featuring team and user timelines, and a list of projects with tasks:
You can effortlessly schedule tasks in the dashboard or create new tasks in a few clicks, all data is fully synchronized. Accompanying the timelines, users also enjoy the supplementary advantage of workload indicators. These indicators offer a visual signal, whether the users' workload is below capacity (depicted in yellow), beyond capacity (depicted in red), or optimally balanced (depicted in green).
There's no pre-built custom events for things like bookings, meetings, holidays, days off, and vacations. However, these can be really useful for managing time off and workloads. ActivityTimeline helps with holiday management:
ActivityTimeline introduces a Team Panel in addition to the user timeline function, granting teams the power of strategic planning and enhanced oversight. This dedicated team calendar streamlines resource distribution and scheduling, enabling users to establish extended plans within various timeframes, spanning months or quarters.
The Team mode further delivers a straightforward representation of workloads across teams, significantly simplifying extensive planning for individual teams or the entire organization:
Personal Calendar
The app additionally provides a unique personal workspace for each team member. Within this space, the user has the ability to review individual work schedules, including tasks and projects displayed there. Individuals can use a personal planning timeline to establish and oversee their tasks, define deadlines, track progress, and prioritize assignments according to their preferences.
Additionally, it shows you how much work you have or how free your schedule is for a specific period. You can also directly log the hours you've worked, whether they're billable or not, right from your own workspace. This tool considers internal tasks like meetings or trips too, and it's easy to add these activities to the timeline to keep an accurate record of the working hours.
ActivityTimeline Timesheets & Reports
ActivityTimeline offers different custom timesheet templates of your choice. Just choose the needed values, teams/users, and projects, use the templates, or create your custom timesheets, all without effort:
A reporting feature is also included. Numerous reports are available, offering extensive customization and the ability to generate them with just a few simple clicks. It is possible to add reports as Jira gadgets to your Jira gadget the same way you add your standard Jira Gadgets. Navigate to Dashobards → Open your dashboard → Click ‘Edit’ on the top right corner.
Summing Up
Managing multiple projects doesn’t have to feel like herding cats. With a centralized, visual approach like ActivityTimeline, you can transform complexity into clarity. The app becomes your team’s central source for planning, task management, and progress reporting—all deeply integrated with Jira.
It helps you stay on top of all the tasks, timelines, and team needs while offering the flexibility to adjust plans as you go. Whether you’re managing two projects or ten, the right project management tool can make all the difference.
