Thanks for the update on SmartPlans - won't waste time on that one in the short term.
Toms Planner does not provide any mechanism for entering times and calculating day by day or week by week workloads. It is just a visual planner but I find having a visual plan which I can eyeball to see potential clashes very helpful, particularly if it is very quick to update (which it is). So not ideal but the best thing I have found so far to complement MLO. It also good because you can put other people's work on it as well and see the relationship between what you are doing and everybody else. And I would agree with you with regard to the absence of anything that helps you with the 'How much work have I got on during period x' problem. Microsoft Project does it but it is complicated to use and expensive as it is designed to support very large projects. I think it is partly the GTD mindset that says (as far as I understand) "don't bother with forward planning it is a waste of time.". This works fine for things like household tasks where there are no particular deadlines but is useless for you and I who have clients/customers who expect things done by certain dates and, rightly, are not very happy when you miss those dates. The view which was expressed recently that it wouldn't help if you did know whether you could take on an extra piece of work, just doesn't apply as quite often people will accept a delay in starting a piece of work but find it much more problematic if you fail to deliver by the agreed date (as they have then planned in other activities around your delivery date). And even if they go elsewhere, they may come back later whereas, if you take it on and then don't deliver you then have a seriously unhappy client (or you find yourself, yet again, working an 80 hour week). So I, for one (and there are clearly many others here), would welcome something in MLO which helps us see more clearly what is coming up in the next few weeks and the workload implications of that. Not easy but I think many of the elements are in place. And as you say, I think it would fill a significant niche. I would also be interested to hear how you have achieved something in MLO that helps you with this task. I use a ToDo view that groups 'Key Tasks' (which are higher level tasks that I flag) by Start Date which helps but I just don't find the visual layout very helpful and there is nothing that sums the time allocated to each task by day or week. Richard From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Mary Renaud Sent: 17 January 2011 8:05 PM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: [MLO] Preventing bottlenecks due to conflicting/crashing project deadlines Hi Richard, Yes, it is a mobile app (iPhone/iPod/iPad) and I downloaded it yesterday to give it a try as a complimentary tool. It's a good concept but too buggy to use. While I love that it allows you to enter the end date, start date, and total hours for a project and then it gives you a graph with your workload (along with a line that lets you see whether it's above/below the workload you want) so that you can change dates to make everything fit the amount of hours you have available, it crashed many many (many, many) times during use. So many times that I would consider it utterly unusable (I would say an average of less than 30 seconds of use before crashes). I tried the company's fix as listed on their website and this changed nothing. My iPhone is under 2 months old so it's not that my OS is too old. I will have a look at Tom's Planner as a compliment as well. Thanks I seem to have come up with a temporary system that works inside of MLO. It took a long time to set up and I'm still tweaking it but I will be glad to share it when I see if it works properly. I'd gladly create and upload a template as well if there's room for that here somewhere. What I don't understand is why so few pieces of software include a "How much work have you booked for period X" feature. Any of the good ones have you estimate your time per task or per project as well as deadlines and lead times so the data's all there. How is it that SmartPlans claims to be the first to have this type of feature. Unless you have only one project (or very flexible deadlines), it can get very complicated very fast. In fact, when I did create my makeshift system, I realized that I had a week where I had 93 hours of work booked (to fit into a 42.5 hour week). Had I continued using the "today forward" method I would have either missed deadlines or had a VERY bad week! Seeing that allows me to adjust start times and spread the work out so that I wouldn't wind up with that kind of a crunch. If I can think through a helpful way to phrase a feature request (i.e. try to find what the minimum is that is needed for this so the programmers can get the most bang for their programming-hours buck) I'll do so. It seems like something like this would pull a program, especially as full-featured a program as MLO unquestionably to the front of the pack. Thanks for the suggestion. I'll check it out this afternoon. Mary -- 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]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/mylifeorganized?hl=en. -- 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]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/mylifeorganized?hl=en.
