Unable to schedule a 4-hour task completed over 2 days in Gantt Chart

Question

I'm trying to create a detailed Gantt chart, using MS Project 2013, for a project in one of my courses.

Being a student, I'm not working the same number of hours every day. For example, I may have a task to complete that I know will take about 4 hours, but I will start it Monday, and finish it Tuesday. I haven't been able to translate this to the Gantt Chart in MS Project.

Every time I set the percent work completed to 100% and set my start date, then a finish date a day later, it changes my duration to 16 hours and work complete to 25%. I can't seem to get it to stop auto calculating the times, which is really inconvenient due to the irregular and sporadic nature of the time I have available to work on this project.

tl;dr What I want is to set a start date, the date I actually finished it, % complete, the # of hours I think it will take, and the actual # of hours it took me.

Answer 1

You need to set the task type to Fixed Duration, which is on the Advanced tab of the Task Information dialog. Having done that set the duration to 2d. Then add the Work column to your display and set the Work=4h for that task. It will show 4 hours of work spread out over two days.