My band-aid system: At the bottom of my outline list, I created a task (as a folder) with a long string of dashes to visually separate my deadline-free or soft deadline tasks from the hard deadline tasks/projects. Under that (as siblings) I created projects, each named for an upcoming Monday to Friday date range (e.g. "Jan 24 - Jan 28", "Jan 31 - Feb 4", etc). I created 12 or 13 of them as that suits my needs at the moment.
I then went into my outline and selected my projects and tasks with hard deadlines and slipped them in the weekly folder that corresponds to their deadline. If a deadline is early in the week, say a Monday or Tuesday, I slip it in the week before (again, your needs may vary). I then went through the project (as I moved it, so I didn't forget) and pulled tasks that needed to be done earlier out from their parent project, and placed them in earlier weeks according to their deadlines. (I also added a suffix with the project's name or initials so I would still know where it came from or, for multiple tasks, kept them under a parent task with no information other than the project initials or name.) I made certain each task had duration estimates. If I wasn't yet certain of all the tasks that needed to be done for a specific project, I created placeholder tasks that I will replace with specific tasks as the project gets fleshed out. (So they could be spread out as necessary, which comes later.) I then created a placeholder for tasks that recur each week. I left their recurring tasks above the dashed line, but created a "recurring items" task (with subtasks so that I can easily adjust if a recurring item, like a weekly committee meeting, gets cancelled, but that's likely unnecessary for many people). I also endured the time estimates were accurate for those. I then copied that group of tasks and pasted one into each week. Finally, I went to the top level of each week, beginning with the farthest into the future, and, since it's a project with the tasks and projects in that week as children, I could easily see how many hours were booked for that week. I moved tasks to earlier weeks as necessary to even out the workload and leave room for unexpected items. I then moved backwards to the previous week and did the same, and repeated for all weeks. There were a few other tweaks (like a "deadline management" context to those tasks in the bottom half of my outline, so that I can easily manipulate 'to do' views) but I think they were relatively specific to my needs so I'll spare you a longer email than I've already created. Once I had done this, the to do views became useful again because I didn't have that am-I-going-to-hit-a-bottleneck question gnawing at me and actually knew what really needed to be done at any given time. Over the last week, with that distraction/concern/stress removed, I have been much more productive and less distracted. Knowing that things are ~really~ properly planned out has freed me up to do the strangest thing: get the work done. I hope you find this useful. Obviously ymmv. Sent from my iPhone On 2011-01-23, at 6:27 AM, "Richard Collings" <[email protected]> wrote: > 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. -- 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.
