Every day in Planner starts out unpublished and its tasks will not be visible to Regular users or synced to calendars. This gives Schedulers, Managers, and Admins a chance to plan and tweak a day’s tasks before making the schedule public. In this way, publishing a day is a way to signal that the task schedule is final.

How does publishing work?

Task groups are published independently, to allow different teams to schedule work on their own timelines. When you are ready to publish a task group for a day, navigate to that day in Planner, select that task group from the header, and press the Publish button.

After you publish a task group for the day, here’s what will happen:

• All tasks from that group that fall on the day will be shown to all users and synced to calendars.
• A notification will be sent to users who work on those tasks.

Making changes to published days

It can be necessary to make changes to tasks after their group has been published, for example to reassign tasks when someone takes Last Minute AFK. When you make these changes, here’s what happens:

• The changes are immediately shown in Dashboard, Planner, and My Schedule and update in synced calendars.
• A few minutes after you finish making changes, a notification will be sent to any affected users.

Publishing with users in multiple timezones

Publishing a day affects tasks from midnight-to-midnight in your organization’s timezone. But if you have users across the world, their local working day may actually fall on two Planner days. It’s useful to remember that any task that partly falls on a published day will be published.

This means that users who are far away from your organization’s timezone sometimes only get partial days published. This is a tradeoff we made to balance supporting a global staff with the need to have easily-understandable publishing rules. In practice at Automattic, we’ve found it ends up working well.