I agree that there is no easy solution and I would also like to have a mechanism which showed the workload implications of tasks that run over multiple days - partly to support people who work in the way that you do and partly because I would also find it useful - particularly when looking at my work beyond the next few days.
However what is driving my desire to extend MLO in some way is the fact that, if I look at my working life, my main problem (which far outweighs everything else) is my inability to plan and execute my work in a way which stops me a) overloading myself and b) leaving stuff to the last minute. And I am clear that a significant part of that problem arises from my inability to 'visualise' my upcoming work. And given that all these tasks are already in MLO, it would be very valuable to me if it could be extended in some way to provide this visualisation so as to help me with this problem. What I find puzzling is that nobody on the 'anti calendar' side of the debate has proposed an alternative non-MLO mechanism to helping with this planning issue so my conclusion is that either they are able to do it 'in their head' or that there workloads are sufficiently light that it is not a problem. What is also interesting is that all the methodologies (GTD, Autofocus, Do It Today, etc) appear to be primarily concerned with techniques to solve 'what should I do next' problem and have very little to say about the 'Can I get it done by next Friday' problem. The Pomodoro Technique offers some ideas in this area (but even here it is limited). So if anybody has any suggestions for useful sources of ideas in this area , I would be very interested. Richard From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of phil reaston Sent: 15 September 2010 10:17 PM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: [MLO] Re: Calendar View - Load Balancing That's only going to work if all your tasks are less than a day long. If you have tasks (like I do) that may span several days it won't work - you'll see all the time on one day I think. And before you say I need to break the tasks down smaller I'm not sure I want to do that - for instance "clean out garage" - I don't want to specify all the individual tasks for this, I just go into the garage and get on with it. I may even want to do as much as I feel like one day and then leave the rest for subsequent days. Some of my programming tasks are like this too - "clean up comments in code" - maybe I just do a little each day as a breather from the hard work - I'd need a way to put that in the schedule as "just do part of it". I actually agree with the "No Calendar" group for reasons that have been stated by others, but mostly because I see any task manager as an aid to seeing what have to do, what's getting late etc rather than telling me what to do each day. Just my 2c. Back to cleaning the garage :-) Phil Reaston (702) 358-4080 On Wed, Sep 15, 2010 at 2:04 PM, Richard Collings <[email protected]> wrote: Just to be clear - its scheduling that I want too but just something that shows my workload (what I have planned for each day, how much time each task is going to take and the total workload for the day) and allows me to adjust it manually. I don't want automatic scheduling. -----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of pottster Sent: 11 September 2010 5:22 PM To: MyLifeOrganized Subject: [MLO] Re: Calendar View - Load Balancing The calendar issue is obviously close to people's hearts! I can fully sympathize with Richard's requirements but I'm probably with Steve in suggesting that the needed MLO functionality is more about scheduling rather than diary/calendar management. Talking of the latter, if you use Outlook I think that there is really good functionality in there that people don't use (know about?). I'm a great believer in employing the right tools for the job. Have a look at these screenshots as an example. http://www.mediafire.com/i/?qryqphlm17zlm5s http://www.mediafire.com/i/?e9isble16i7mned http://www.mediafire.com/i/?ijx2crq7xqock0x This is a side by side view of one day for two separate calendars. The calendars can be merged with one or the other prominent. The view can also be weekly if required. The calendar on the left is for appointments which are usually events, fixed in time, involving more than just yourself and often at a particular location. The calendar on the right contains time slots allocated for personal work which can be more flexible and usually involve just yourself. The latest consensus on personal productivity suggests these type of "appointments" with yourself can be very effective in not allowing your schedule to be railroaded by other people and other people's priorities. If you are on a team calendar this would show as non-available time. These views in Outlook make it easy to block out time in amongst hard landscape appointments for personal time. These blocks could then be broken down further, into small tasks, by tools such as MLO. In addition, there could be another calendar to show actual v planned activity for the day for review/billing purposes (where did the day go?). As a self-employed consultant, Richard's day may be more in his own control and be more a dilemma of workload balancing. However, use of a separate calendar in Outlook (or similar) for individual tasks, if they warrant it and are long enough in duration, could easily be handled by drag and drop of blocks of time representing the task and/or pomodoro units in this intuitive interface. It's simplistic but it is also easy. Capacity planning/scheduling (which is essentially what we're talking about) is a VERY complex subject - I know, I spent many years in Manufacturing. Trying to look for an automated solution is something which has taxed better brains than most for many years without a solution. Keep it simple ;-) On Sep 11, 3:51 pm, "Richard Collings" <[email protected]> wrote: > This is a good step in the right direction. In an ideal world I would like > the time units be configurable as I use Pomodoro's (30 minutes long) as my > unit of time recording > > > > > > > > -----Original Message----- > From: [email protected] > > [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of pottster > Sent: 11 September 2010 1:22 AM > To: MyLifeOrganized > Subject: [MLO] Re: Calendar View - Load Balancing > > Further to my last post, here are a couple of mock ups to show what I > had in mind... > > http://www.mediafire.com/i/?d9p2dxhpb5me9uw > > http://www.mediafire.com/i/?7izej6wb52smeda > > On Sep 10, 11:48 pm, pottster <[email protected]> wrote: > > The debate about a calendar view goes on! > > > I suspect that the level of disagreement about whether this is needed > > or not means that it is unlikely to be implemented in the near future. > > In the meantime, it may be that Andrey will be most open to small > > changes which partly deliver what people want within existing > > functionality. > > > An example of this is where a calendar view has been requested to help > > balance daily workload. Take a look at this view. > > >http://www.mediafire.com/i/?252esf71qop7o62 > > > With a tweak to include the total time for that day's tasks in the > > grouping header and/or some sort of traffic light system (red/amber/ > > green) to give visual feedback on over/under a standard daily hourly > > capacity, a "quick and dirty" assessment can easily be made. > > Furthermore it would be a simple matter to balance the daily workload > > by drag and drop between groups or right click on the due date. > > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > "MyLifeOrganized" group. > To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. > To unsubscribe from this group, send email to > [email protected] <mailto:mylifeorganized%[email protected]> . > For more options, visit this group athttp://groups.google.com/group/mylifeorganized?hl=en. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "MyLifeOrganized" group. 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