One Editor at a Time: A Smarter Chart Lock

How the lock works

Only one person can have edit access to a chart at a time. If someone already has it open for editing, everyone else who opens that same chart lands in read-only mode automatically. Nothing gets overwritten, because nobody else can make changes at the same moment.

Why not real-time co-editing

We looked seriously at building live, type-at-the-same-time collaboration, the kind you get in Google Docs. It's an appealing idea, but making it completely reliable, with no risk of glitches or quietly lost work, is a genuinely hard problem to solve well. For a tool people use to plan real projects with real deadlines, we'd rather hand you something simple we can fully stand behind than something flashier that occasionally lets you down. So we built a lock instead, and we've kept refining how it behaves.

New lock icon in Tom's Planner

Getting edit access

The lock icon sits in the top left corner, right next to the chart title. What happens when you click it depends on whether anyone else is already working on that chart.

If it's free, you get edit access immediately. That covers most of the moments you'll spend in Tom's Planner.

Say a colleague already has the chart open and is actively working on it. Click the lock, and you'll see right away who currently has it, along with a button to request access for yourself.

From there, a few things can happen. If your colleague is at their desk and responds, they'll get a quick prompt asking whether to hand the lock over. If they grant it, you're straight in. If they turn it down, because they're still in the middle of something, you'll be notified that your request was declined, and the only thing to do is wait for them to finish and try again shortly after.

If your colleague isn't actually there to respond, say they've stepped away for lunch, or they're working in another browser tab while this one just happens to still be open, the system notices and hands the lock over to you automatically. Nobody on their end has to click a thing.

It's a small wait, when it happens at all, compared to the alternative this whole system exists to avoid: two people quietly overwriting each other's work.

Roll out

We rolled this version out earlier this summer. It's been running without a single interruption or glitch since, which was really the whole point. Next time you and a teammate happen to be looking at the same chart, keep an eye on that little lock. Chances are, you won't even notice it working.