In March, our co-founder Nathan Coffey ran a live build for the Airtable Media & Entertainment User Group, taking a base a team already relied on and turning it into a resourcing base, live.
Here’s the business case, the full build, and everything you need to set one up yourself.
- Turn a base your team already uses into a resourcing view that shows, at a glance, who has capacity to take on what.
- The part that changes how you plan: it shows what a new task will do to someone’s capacity before you assign it, not after.
- The engine is a utilisation view Airtable already has, hidden in the timeline toolbar, that most teams have never found.
- The only prep is an hours value on each task (t-shirt sizing does this fast) and weekly hours on each person. No new rollups, no formula sprawl.
Why capacity is the thing that breaks.
Media teams are not short of work. They are often short of people.
With most teams already running close to capacity, the goal for this build is practical: make sure the hours you have go to the work that matters most, and give everyone a fair view of what they are carrying.
What shifts for you
You stop guessing who has room
Right now, capacity lives in people’s heads. You hand out work on a gut feel for who is slammed and who is not. A resourcing view turns that guess into a number you can see, so “who can take this on” stops being a debate.
The prep is light: each task carries an hours value, and a quick t-shirt size (XS to L) sets that for you, so nobody estimates every request by hand.
Your whole team's capacity, on one screen
Instead of piecing capacity together across tables and spreadsheets, you get one view of who is carrying what, and when (and you are not building it from scratch).
Airtable already has a utilisation view, hidden in the timeline toolbar, that almost no one has found. You are switching on something you already own, and because the maths happens in the dashboard, your underlying base stays clean, with no new rollups or formula fields required.
See the impact before you assign the work
Normally you find out someone is overloaded once the work is already on their plate. With this setup you see it first. As you assign a task, a preview shows what it will do to that person’s capacity. In an example team, the same piece of work takes one person to 88 percent, pushes another to 109 percent, and lands a third at 97 percent. One task, three very different answers, and you pick which one you are making before you commit.
How to build an Airtable resourcing base, step by step.
Prefer to watch Nathan build it live? The full session is here, or read on for the step-by-step.
Nathan built this on an existing studio marketing base, with creative requests as the work. Start from a base your team already uses and trusts.
- Add a start date. Most request tables only carry a due date. Utilisation needs to know when work begins. Nathan used Omni to add the field and backfill the records.
- Give every piece of work an hours value. Add a number field for estimated time in hours. Fill it directly, or link to a T-shirt sizing table and pull the hours in with a lookup.
- Build a people table. Link your assignee field to it. Add title and email, then the field that matters: number of working hours per week.
- Bring working hours onto the work table. This is the step that trips everyone. Add a lookup or rollup on the creative request table that pulls the assignee’s working hours across.
- Create the timeline view. New view, timeline, point it at your creative requests, set the start date and the due date, finish. Name it Utilisation.
- Group by assignee. This gives you a swim lane per person, so you can see who is carrying what, and when.
- Turn on the hidden utilisation summary. In the interface settings for that timeline, find the timeline summary in the toolbar and switch on utilisation. Map hours required to estimated time in hours, and available hours to the field you brought across in step four.
- Add colour. Set a threshold so anyone above about 90 percent reads as at capacity. Airtable’s resource allocation template shows a good version, with green, amber and red bands.
- Add time off. In the available hours section, toggle time off on. Airtable prompts you to create a days off table. Add a record for each absence and capacity adjusts for it. You can sync that table from Google Calendar or an existing leave tool.
- Turn on Preview Utilisation. Back in the interface, open the assignee field settings and switch it on. Now every assignment decision shows its own consequence.
A bonus AI layer
On any linked record field, Airtable can use AI to surface top matches when you select a record. Point it at the asset type on one side and the person’s role on the other, and it suggests the three best matched people. Pair that with utilisation and you answer both questions at once: who is right for this, and who has headroom.
Working hours have to live on the work table. The utilisation summary cannot read a field that only sits in your people table. Add a lookup or rollup so each assignee’s weekly hours land on the same table as the work. Skip this and the summary breaks with no obvious reason why.
Lookup or rollup? Try both. The utilisation summary divides hours of work by hours available, so both numbers have to reach it as numbers. A lookup can arrive as text or as an array, which makes the percentages come out wrong or show an infinity symbol. A rollup pulls the value through as a number instead. Nathan’s advice: “You can just try option A and option B, and usually one of them works.”
Preview Utilisation will not appear until the dashboard exists. The toggle only shows up once you have built a utilisation view in your interfaces. If you cannot find it, that is why.
Two assignees split the work evenly. Assign a task to two people and Airtable splits the effort fifty fifty across their capacity. Anything more precise needs a different structure.
FAQ
We keep our estimates and requests in Jira. Can we get that into Airtable without duplicating everything?
Yes, as long as it lives in Jira Cloud. Add a synced table and pull the records in. Once you have a start date, a level of effort and an assignee linked to a people table, the dashboard goes straight on top.
Can a task have more than one assignee?
Yes. Set the assignee field to allow linking to multiple records. Airtable splits the effort evenly between them, so two people on one task each carry half of it. A real split, like 70 and 30, takes a more nuanced setup.
Someone is usually available forty hours a week but is on leave. How is that handled?
Through the days off table. In the utilisation toolbar, open available hours and toggle time off on. Add a record for each absence and capacity adjusts for that period. Team members can add their own leave, and you can sync the table from a calendar tool.
Can I filter on the utilisation percentage to find who is over or under assigned?
Not with the built-in method, and that is a real limitation on a team of a hundred. Utilisation is calculated across a time period rather than stored on a record, so there is no field to filter on. You would need a weekly or monthly utilisation table alongside your work table. Doable, but deliberate.
Try it yourself.
Recording: Watch the full session — the complete live build, embedded above too
TEMPLATe: Airtable’s resource allocation template — free, ships with a team directory, time off calendar, project planning and a utilisation chart
COMMUNITY: Airtable Media & Entertainment User Group — future sessions and past recordings
Nathan Coffey is a co-founder at Nifty. He found Airtable in 2018, back when the product was, in his words, “literally just a database.” He spent the years after that consulting at Airtable, delivering a couple of hundred builds, almost all of them in media. He now does that work as an external partner, building on Airtable and standing up the internal teams who run it across large, cross-functional organisations. Connect with him on LinkedIn.
Nifty is the Airtable transformation partner for media companies. We are a Gold-certified Airtable partner, top-rated globally, trusted by Netflix, Disney, CBS, Paramount and Yahoo.
What's next.
- Follow Nifty on LinkedIn for the next session and write-up
- Join the Airtable Media & Entertainment User Group
- Connect with Nathan if you want to talk through your own resourcing setup
- Talk to Nifty about your own Airtable build
