[wilsonng]

Completely understandable with the double entry just feeling like an extra waste of time....

Unfortunately, iCal seems to be a bit underpowered when it comes to task management.

The only thing I really do is just create a perspective that sorts everything out by start date. Make sure the View Bar is shown by selecting View > Show View Bar. Then set the view bar with the following:

Context Filter: Remaining
Grouping: Start
Sorting: Start
Availability Filter: Available
Status Filter: Any
Estimated Time Filter: Any Duration


You can see any tasks that have to start on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday.

From there, you will have to judge how many tasks need to be started on Monday.

Personally, I like to be able to see it in a monthly calendar view myself. That's why I bought BusyCal. I like to visually see my tasks in a monthly calendar view.

After mapping my Photoshoot context to an iCal calendar called Photoshoot stuff, BusyCal puts my task into the day square in the monthly calendar view.

On my calendar, I can see my day squares get filled up for this week:

Monday: 3 tasks
Tuesday: 5 tasks
Wednesday: 6 tasks
Thursday: no tasks
Friday: 1 task


Just by looking at BusyCal, I can pretty much guess how time intensive certain tasks are. I can see that Monday starts off fairly quiet with only 3 tasks but things go crazy on Tuesday and Wednesday. But Thursday is very quiet and Friday only has 1 task left.

So now I can schedule in tasks on whatever day I want. I can guess that i can squeeze in 1 or 2 more tasks on Monday. Tuesday and Wednesday looks pretty full with at least 5 tasks on Tuesday and 6 tasks on Wednesday.

I can see Thursday is wide open and I'll likely schedule in another photoshoot there.

Friday is very light and I can schedule more tasks on that day.

Tasks don't have a time duration so I just put it in the notes section for billing purposes.

not a perfect system but it's working. I don't have time to waste looking for the perfect software solution unless I pay someone $1,000.00 to create a custom software solution for me.

BusyCal was the missing ingredient for me. I wished OmniFocus had a "calendar" view but oh well.... Life goes on and I can't wait.....

Hopefully this will work for you.