I've been trying for years, but much as I love MLO, the one thing I have trouble doing is scheduling my tasks.
I know that GTD preaches against this, and I know that many productivity coaches also advise against scheduling tasks. I admit that I'm still terrible at completing a task in the calendar even if I do schedule it, but at least it's there, and it's a motivator. There are a few things that keep failing me on MLO / GTD that scheduling would help: - Planning - I can't plan a series of tasks for a due date - eg. report due end of week, and five subtasks across the week. - Overbooking - every time I get an organisational spurt, I start planning out several goals for the week - invariably I overbook myself, fail to complete each day, become demoralised, and just fall further back as the week progresses - Reporting - If someone asks me "what are you doing on Thursday", GTD (and MLO) doesn't give me visibility that I'll be really busy then, because I have deliverables on Friday. There's just a collection of tasks between now and then, with no depiction of how to space them out - Modifying dates - Probably the reason for not scheduling tasks, is that you then spend hours re-scheduling them! It's clunky in almost every to-do app - manually changing a date/time without being able to see the calendar underneath it. It should really be drag'n'drop. What I would really like, is to be able to *have scheduled tasks appear in my calendar!* More than that - I would like to be able to *drag'n'drop* them around in my calendar! So the flow would go something like this (and in *Gqueues*, below, it does): - I look at my calendar for the week in my native calendar application (I use MacOS ical / IOS Calendar) - On it, in a different colour (different Google sub-calendar, for example), are some tasks I scheduled for a deliverable for end of month - I check my next 2-3 days, and drag them around to better fit any new meetings. - The changes are synced back to MLO, and I check in the main projects to see what that does to the due dates for each - I'm looking overbooked, so I postpone an internal project to next week, and advise my boss - As the day goes on, I drag, extend, etc. these scheduled tasks in ical or calendar as things change - As always, if my boss asks me for the forecast on a project, I can look at the project view and see all the dates as I currently have them The trick is syncing to the native calendar app. Rather than spend huge effort designing a calendar UI, interaction, etc. - why not just design an API that talks to CalDAV, iCal, etc which is two-way? I've found three apps that do this so far: - Asana <https://asana.com/guide/help/views/calendar> - Big Heavyweight, but not great in this feature. Tasks can only be given a date, not a time, so they appear as 'all day'. The ICS feed to iCAL is one way, so you can view tasks in a particular day, but not move them around - you have to go back to Asana for that. But they do have their own calendar view, where you can drag/drop. - Todoist <https://support.todoist.com/hc/en-us/articles/208789889-Using-Todoist-with-your-Calendar> - Also apparently claim to have implemented calendar view and two-way sync in the calendar. I've not tested it yet. The two-way sync only works with Google Calendar <https://support.todoist.com/hc/en-us/articles/115003128085\>, for others it's one-way - Gqueues <https://www.gqueues.com/help/calendarIntegration> - This is the one I'm currently testing. Again, it does permit native two-way sync in iCal, and it's very quick as well. I've been using GQueues, and the UX is as I'd like. Whether it actually helps me meet deadlines, is something I'm currently testing. But - MLO is so good in so many other ways. I would really like to have this feature in MLO - perhaps as a checkbox on a task for 'schedule task', to flag that it should sync to the calendar. MLO already has cloud sync, so perhaps a calendar sync could be built as an API from it? Damo -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "MyLifeOrganized" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to mylifeorganized+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to mylifeorganized@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/mylifeorganized. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/mylifeorganized/68e74648-8336-4cdf-8fff-907d73ba4c4a%40googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
