If you are building your ePortfolio within an educational or professional setting, it's likely that you are doing so to meet particular course or business objectives. A lot of these objectives will be timely and therefore, it's important to be organized to ensure you meet your deadlines!

Mahara plans are there to help you. You can make a plan, which consists of a number of tasks, each with their own completion date. When you've finished a task you can just check it off to mark it done.

It's probably unreasonable to suggest that you will log in to Mahara to use this feature in organizing your daily life tasks such as doing the shopping or going to see Auntie Flo (it's more likely that you would keep an online diary or perhaps even better a checklist application on your mobile Smartphone). However, it is still a very useful addition because it enables you to set learning-related schedules for yourself. These could be over the course of a year; for example, an allotment gardener who celebrates their work within their Mahara ePortfolio might want to use the Mahara planning facility to set seasonal task lists for seeding, hoeing, planting, and harvesting.

Somebody assessing a cohort of learners on a portfolio-building project might want to use this planning tool within the portfolio itself to manage their schedule of monthly activities. Alternatively, as a portfolio-building learner, you might want to track your completion of tasks directly related to your portfolio and work schedule such as "Finish the journal entry about my visit to Edinburgh Castle" ... and that's why we really like this feature!

Neil from Training for Work thinks:

It was a nice surprise to see that Mahara has a simple plans feature included out of the box. From a tracking point of view, it gives me a simple mechanism for seeing that the learners are setting realistic goals related to work competencies. I can sit with my learners and they can explain to me how they are progressing. Because this is built into the Mahara system, it also means that plans can be included in pages of evidence and shared with me, which is great. I like that whilst this has enabled me to see whether or not the students are doing the things they should be, it also gives them the flexibility to set themselves their own deadlines and work schedules — taking ownership of their progress. I will not only encourage the students to use this feature, but also use it for myself to set targets for checking student progress. I've had an idea to display my plans on my dashboard page, to remind me of the important things I have left to do.