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Re-arranging / balancing schedules Thread Tools Search this Thread Display Modes
I have a lot of tasks that fit into my "main" context - stuff that I can do at work, just about whenever. Many, many days work of tasks.

What I would like to do is decide when to do them. I'd like to have a calendar-like system, and drag and drop them around.

I have used OmniPlan and I like it, for some projects. But I'm more thinking about soft scheduling with rough estimates. Things that I do based entirely on my own estimate of "That looks like a good amount of work to do in a day."

I think this would also help me with motivation to some extent - making a commitment to doing a certain number of tasks.

It would also help me with giving feedback to co-workers. I would be able to discuss when things would happen.

I've started out right now making contexts for days of the week, and I'll see how that goes.

I considered flagging "to do today" tasks, but right now I use flagging for "You really, really better do this immediately" tasks. Some sort of richer tagging system would probably help me out more.

Any thoughts? Some external app that interacted with the OF database would seem like the most likely answer.
 
How far out are you trying to schedule yourself? How often does real life intervene and force you to spend a day in completely different ways than you expected?
 
I'm looking at the next two to maybe four weeks. Any longer and I'm more at the level of broad monthly progress goals. Real life intervenes sometimes, as do procrastination, priority changes, and software taking longer than expected.
 
Yikes, I get hives trying to plan my schedule for 2 days out :-) I can't offer you much sage advice there, as we clearly inhabit different worlds. I think I see what you are trying to do with day of the week contexts, but isn't that going to get messy when you start trying to do things that will fall on Wednesday of different weeks?

My inclination for doing this sort of thing would be to use a combination of OmniFocus and OmniPlan. My thinking is that any project that is going to occupy your attention for more than a week probably needs some careful planning, a la OmniPlan. I would set up a work week with say 5 or 6 hours a day devoted to the big project(s), planned in OmniPlan, and devote the other hours available to working through the detritus of everyday life in a less structured fashion with OmniFocus. You can toss tasks into OmniFocus from OmniPlan with the clipping feature if you want to work them into the mix for a given day, but use OmniPlan to see what slipping the schedule on some action will do to your overall timeline, for example.
 
Whoops...I wasn't clear enough.

What I'm trying to do is much less precise than it sounds.

I'd like to be able to say things like, "I'll have that to you at the end of next week." To say that, I need to look at what else I'm planning to do this week and next week. Just a list of tasks and days, something that I will determine myself rather than something that would be programatically determined based on workload.

I would look at the schedule and think, "I've got a lot going on this week, I can't promise anybody more stuff this week."

Or, "You want that by the end of this week? OK, I'll have to put off these other things that I was doing."

A calendar-like system that I can drag and drop tasks around would be just about right.

I'm thinking that I will experiment more with doing this entirely within contexts, and possibly write some AppleScript to move things around and/or rename them.

In other words:
Contexts for "Today (Tuesday)", "Tomorrow (Wednesday)", "Thursday", "Friday", "Next Week" which would contain "Monday", etc.

Daily AppleScript would rename "Today (Wednesday)", and move the tasks around.

Would also need an "Overdue unfinished" context that would collect everything that I didn't tick off.

I'd need a carefully crafted perspective for doing this, since some tasks would need to be done in order. But, realistically, my stuff here is *not* that complex, I just want to look at my week and say "I can do more" or "Wow, I don't know if I can get this done" and warn people.

The challenge, of course, is to do this without spending so much time building the tool that I would be more productive if I simply sat down and worked. :)

(When I'm a billionaire, I will have productivity software that works precisely how I want it to. :)
 
I've been trying to figure this out to, and the best I can come up with is copying some tasks/projects into my google calendar or writing them in a weekly agenda.
 
 


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