A project baseline is a locked snapshot of your schedule — the original planned start and finish dates for every task. Once set, it does not change when tasks slip or accelerate. Maverick displays the baseline as thin gray ghost bars alongside each task bar in the Gantt chart, so you can see exactly how much the schedule has drifted at a glance. These six steps cover the complete baseline workflow: when to set it, how to read it, how to manage partial re-baselining, and when to restore or clear.

1. Finalize Your Plan Before Setting the Baseline

A baseline captures whatever dates are in the schedule at the moment you set it. If you set the baseline while tasks are still being estimated or re-ordered, the ghost bars will reflect a draft plan rather than the approved one. Wait until the project plan has been reviewed, approved, and signed off — typically just before the first task is scheduled to start. Setting the baseline at the right moment means every future comparison is made against a plan that was actually agreed upon, not an intermediate draft.

2. Set the Project-Level Baseline

Right-click the project in the project list and choose Set Baseline, or open the project's properties panel and use the Baseline section. A project-level baseline captures the current start and finish date of every task in the project simultaneously. This is the most common approach for locking a complete, approved plan. Maverick stores the baseline dates as separate fields on each task, distinct from the live dates — setting the baseline does not move any tasks.

3. Read the Ghost Bars in the Gantt Chart

After the baseline is set, Maverick draws a thin gray bar below each task's normal Gantt bar. These ghost bars mark the baseline position. When ghost and current bars are perfectly aligned, the task is on schedule — its dates have not changed since the baseline was set. When the current bar has shifted to the right of the ghost bar, the task has slipped; the horizontal gap represents the delay. When the current bar is to the left, the task was moved earlier than originally planned. Scan the full Gantt and the pattern of offsets across all rows shows the cumulative state of the schedule at a glance.

4. Re-Baseline Individual Tasks When Scope Changes

Not every baseline revision requires resetting the entire project. When a specific deliverable is re-scoped, renegotiated, or formally approved with new dates, you can set the baseline on individual tasks only. Select the tasks in the project grid, right-click, and choose Set Baseline. The selected tasks get fresh baseline dates reflecting the new approved plan; every other task retains its original baseline. This keeps the ghost bars accurate for the rest of the schedule while acknowledging that specific tasks have been legitimately re-baselined by agreement.

5. Restore from Baseline When Changes Go Wrong

Restoring from a baseline copies the baseline dates back over the task's current start and finish dates, resetting it to the original plan. Use this when changes produce an unexpected result:

  • AI chat changes — AI can update many tasks in a single turn. If the result is not what you intended, a project-level restore rolls the entire schedule back to the baseline in one step, without needing to remember which tasks moved or by how much.
  • Manual Gantt edits — dragging task bars or adjusting durations can cascade through dependencies in unexpected ways. A task-level restore resets only the affected tasks without disturbing the rest of the plan.
  • Another user's changes — in multi-user projects, a team member may have updated task dates incorrectly. Task-level restore lets you revert specific tasks while keeping other changes the user made that you want to keep.

Right-click the project or selected tasks and choose Restore from Baseline. Only tasks that have a baseline set are affected; tasks without a baseline are untouched.

6. Clear the Baseline When the Original Plan Is Obsolete

Clear the baseline when the project has been formally re-planned to the point where comparisons to the original schedule no longer make sense — after a major change order, a significant scope change, or a phase reset. Right-click the project and choose Clear Baseline to remove baseline dates from every task and make the ghost bars disappear. You can also clear at the task level if only a subset of tasks needs to be re-baselined from scratch. Once cleared, you can set a new baseline that captures the revised plan, giving you a fresh and accurate reference point going forward.