[ksenia]

Originally Posted by steve

To add on to this thread:

I love how in itunes you can check on the length of a playlist or your library. A playlist could be 45 minutes and the entire music library could be 9.5 days.

I would be fantastic if you focus on a project and see that you had 1.5 hours left or look at all of your tasks within a particular range and see that you are estimated 50.5 hours of NA's.

For me and my geekiness, this would be a cool way to motivate myself to crank through a project. It could also be helpful when a boss wants to add on a new project to have the ability to say, "I currently estimate that I have a nine day back up before I start that new project. However, I could put the Smith project on hold in which case I would have a four day back-up."

It would also be fantastic to see this in terms of contexts. You could look at your email context and see that you have 20 minutes of emails to crank out. It would be fun to see the time get reduced every time you checked off another task.

I second that. It would be a big help in answering that inevitable question: "WHEN can you implement this request?"

[michelle]

Originally Posted by tacartwright

I would be happy with a single time estimate field. It could be optional. To further simplify, it could be “bucketized” — instead of allowing any time (in minutes) to be entered, it could be a (user-definable) drop-down of durations. Something like “Quick (minutes)”, “Medium (ten of minutes)”, and “Long (hours)” would be sufficient for me. Then you don’t have to worry as much about accuracy and recording actuals.

Thoughts?

— Tim

Currently there is a time estimate field in the task inspector. There is also a column for time estimates. In the future, we'll have UI to hide this column if you don't want to see it. Right now we only allow hours and minutes in the field. If you type 3 days, it will be converted to 24 hrs (because it assumes 8 hr days). We realize this isn't ideal and we're trying to come up with a solution. Also, there is an option to sort tasks by time estimate in the filter bar. This isn't fully implemented yet, but when it is you'll be able to see all tasks that are less than one hr, less than 30 min, etc.

[mcoad]

There’s been no movement in this thread for a while, but rather than starting another on the same topic I’d like to add my vote here and maybe restart it. Yes, please, some time vizualization would be a much valued addition to OF (badly needed, I’d say). I’ve only recently taken up my alpha option for OF and am excited by it. It seems set to be by far the best personal planning and organization app out there - clean, elegant, transparent, intuitive, a joy to use, like its sister Omni apps. But for many of us time vizualization is an intrinsic part of project and task management. By this I mean something that goes one modest step beyond OF as it is at the moment but without becoming in any way a fully-fledged, multi-person, large-scale project planner and manager of the OmniPlan or Merlin type.

For example, I’m a writer. I work on my own, but have several projects on the go concurrently: a novel I’m planning, a TV project I’m researching, several others. OF will greatly help to plan and manage tasks for these, but I also want to be able to map out visually how long each will last, how I can best allocate time and manage them concurrently, work out target dates for my agent, travel, etc. For me this is all of a piece with the listing and structuring of tasks, not some great step beyond them, and there must be many other activities, professional and otherwise, for which this is true. Some calendar or minimal Gantt-type view would be of enormous assistance in doing this. I don’t need anything heavy calibre, so OmniPlan et al are massive overkill; but OF as it stands just stops short of complete usefulness. An option might be to import time periods into iCal rather than just ToDos, but its capacity for this is pretty small and the results would be second-best at most. An in-built calendar/Gantt view in OF would be perfect, and surely should be a doddle to include for the creators of OmniPlan (much less than a lite version of this).

This all seems very obvious to someone in my position, but I’ve searched far and wide and there really seems to be nothing out there that does this. There are a billion task managers (though none as attractive as OF) and large-scale project managers, but nothing that fills this niche - which surely can’t be a small one, as there must be many people out there in a similar position. The only alternative I’ve found is to use something like ChartConstructor to build Gantt charts separately, but without the huge advantages of integration with the overall planner. Add this to OF and the app would just about be perfect, for someone like me at least, without making it too bloated for everyone else.

It would be great to read other views on this and build up some momentum on behalf of those of us who need such a feature. Meanwhile, I’m going to email this to the Omni guys separately as requested.

[Foosjitsu]

Gantt integration would be AWESOME. I only would need the most basic Gantt functionality not enough to ever purchase separate Gantt software but it would be the icing on the cake for me just to be able to get an idea how much stuff I can fit in my day realistically.

[joelande]

Originally Posted by tacartwright

I would be happy with a single time estimate field. It could be optional. To further simplify, it could be “bucketized” — instead of allowing any time (in minutes) to be entered, it could be a (user-definable) drop-down of durations. Something like “Quick (minutes)”, “Medium (ten of minutes)”, and “Long (hours)” would be sufficient for me. Then you don’t have to worry as much about accuracy and recording actuals.

Thoughts?

— Tim

There already is a duration field.

EDIT: Oops sorry, didn't notice that was an old post

[mcoad]

Originally Posted by Foosjitsu

Gantt integration would be AWESOME. I only would need the most basic Gantt functionality not enough to ever purchase separate Gantt software but it would be the icing on the cake for me just to be able to get an idea how much stuff I can fit in my day realistically.

Yes, exactly. As simple as that. But it would make a huge difference for a heck of a lot of users. Seems crazy that a task management app - GTD management, if you will - should rule this out, shooting it off into the big league of project manager apps. What is seeing how your tasks pan out together in time if not a huge aid to managing them and getting them done?

[joelande]

Of course to play the devils advocate, the problem is where do you stop?

You add a calendar view. You add a Gantt view. You add action dependencies.

I do agree however, it would be useful tool to see some sort of time-visualization tool.

[mcoad]

Originally Posted by joelande

Of course to play the devils advocate, the problem is where do you stop?

You add a calendar view. You add a Gantt view. You add action dependencies.

I do agree however, it would be useful tool to see some sort of time-visualization tool.

Sure, that is a problem. I guess a good criterion would be when the app starts to be something different from what it’s intended to be. This is subjective, of course, but what I’m suggesting is that adding a simple time visualization view would be far from this. It wouldn’t demand any more data, just an elementary timeline visualization of what’s already there and the ability to tweak it somewhat. This implies some sort of simple calendar view, of course, but in a sense this is what OF is already all about - you just can’t see it graphically. Certainly not action dependencies, though. Those would move OF into being a project management app. The ability to create links with other docs already exists, and is powerful as it is.

I agree with whoever it was in the forum who said that OF should be about managing and planning your tasks, not carrying them out. And it should be this in as lean and transparent a way as possible - which at the moment it achieves well. The point is that being able to see how your tasks pan out together in time is part-and-parcel of this, not some different sphere. Listing the tasks hierarchically and contextualizing them is part of this management, seeing how they fit together in the working day, week or months is another, directly implied by the first. It just seems crazy to me that in order to do this - and it’s really important for many - you have either to leap into the stratosphere of heavy-duty project managers, or wrestle with some separate Gantt chart builder, or something like OmniGraffle, and lose the dynamic connection with the data in the process. All very clumsy and not conducive to easing Getting Things Done.

Cheers

Malcolm

[mcoad]

As a PS to the above, if it really is thought that such a feature would take OF out of its class, one solution would be the release of a much simplified, lite version of OmniPlan which would work with OF. OF is not cheap - or won’t be once released - but I personally would be willing to pay the few extra bucks for this extra functionality. (Though I don’t think it’s asking too much at the price to build it in!)

I want to throw in my vote for this. I'm in a research position that requires that I work 20 hours per week. I'm also an artist who is struggling to make the time to work on my own projects, so a way to estimate and summarize the amount of time I spend weekly on projects for my research position would be indispensable. All I would need is a way to look back at the week and see the amount of time spent on actions in a given project. OmniFocus could even use the estimate field that's already there for this - all I'm looking for is a daily/weekly/monthly summary.