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Part-time and working patterns

Mermix plans everyone as full-time — Monday to Friday, 8 hours a day — unless you say otherwise. For someone who works fewer days, shorter days, or a different week, give them a working pattern. Nothing else needs setting up: people without a pattern stay full-time.

What a pattern is

A pattern is the hours a person works on each day of the week, starting from a date. For example:

  • Mon–Thu — four 8-hour days, Fridays off.
  • Mon–Fri, 4 h — five half days.
  • Mon–Thu 8 h; Fri 4 h — a short Friday.

Patterns have dates, so a change in someone's hours doesn't rewrite the past. If Anna works full-time until the end of February and Monday to Thursday from 1 March, her January stays full-time in every report and her capacity drops from 1 March on. To go back to full-time later, add a pattern of Monday to Friday, 8 hours, from that date.

Setting a pattern

Admins set patterns on Portfolios → All people:

  1. Open the ⋯ menu on the person's row and choose Working pattern…
  2. Pick the date it starts and enter the hours for each day (0 for a day off; quarter hours such as 7.5 are fine).
  3. Click Save pattern.

Saving a pattern on a date that already has one replaces it. Remove next to a pattern deletes it; the one before it then applies again (or full-time, if there is none). The person's row shows what they work now and the next change, for example Part-time: Mon–Thu from 1 Mar 2026.

What follows a pattern

  • Capacity — each day counts the hours the person works that day. Public holidays and approved leave still come off.
  • Overload — a day is overloaded when the planned hours are more than that day's hours, so 6 hours on a 4-hour Friday shows as over.
  • How a task's hours are spread — over the days the person works, in proportion to their hours. A task across a week for someone on 8 hours Monday and 4 hours Friday puts twice as much on Monday.
  • Reports — the Capacity Heatmap, Utilisation Trend, Hours by Resource and Hours by Project, plus the Portfolios page and the Resource Calendar.
  • The AI copilot — it knows each person's pattern, so it can explain why someone with fewer hours is overloaded sooner.

Where Mermix places work

When Mermix chooses dates itself, it uses the person's working days too:

  • After a Jira pull — an issue with a due date but no start is counted back from the due date over enough of the assignee's working days for the estimate; one with a start but no due date runs forward the same way; issues scheduled back to back fill only the days they work.
  • Scheduling from the backlog — dropping a card on someone's row, or scheduling several at once, sizes each task by that person's days.
  • The AI copilot — auto-schedule, rebalance, what-if scenarios and the critical path all use each person's working days and hours, so a proposal never plans someone on a day they don't work.

Moving a task

When you move a task — drag it along the calendar, onto another person, with the arrow keys, by asking the AI copilot, or with Fix… on a dependency conflict — it keeps the working hours its dates hold, laid out on the working days of the person it lands on. A task across a weekend skips the weekend. A task that took three days for someone on 8 hours a day takes six days for someone on 4. If you stretched a task or squeezed it into fewer days on purpose, that pace moves with it. Resizing a bar is different: the end is exactly where you put it.

A date you chose keeps its date even if the person doesn't work that day — a Friday due date stays the deadline — but it isn't counted as one of the task's working days.

On the calendar

On the Team Calendar, the days a person doesn't work because of their pattern (a Mon–Thu person's Fridays) are shaded on their row, like weekends. The red stripe on a bar and the overload count beside a name use that person's hours for each day. The Resource Calendar greys out the same days.