Hi,
I'm surprised that noone answered yet.
This package is great! You're addressing one of the large shortcomings of
org-mode's planning features: org has information about several planning
details (estimation, duration, holidays, start date, deadline, …) and still
doesn't use any of that to offer help to the user in very simple cases.
Like for instance, I would expect org-mode to say „you shouldn't have >20
tasks scheduled for the same day, because at a default duration of 1 h,
you'll find that there aren't enough working hours to do them“. Or if you
have a 10-hour task and a 12-hour task in the same day, it should trigger
some warning. Or scheduling a work task during a holiday. Or conflicts. Or
work which is scheduled after a deadline. Or 10 tasks scheduled one after
the other without taking into account that humans need to take breaks from
time to time. Or schedules based on out-of-date information like overrun
deadlines or overrun budgets. I want the freedom to be able to do all those
mistakes but I'd also appreciate some help from org-mode or any other tool…
Scheduling algorithms are very hard. Repetitions, time zones, summer time
changes, …
As for org-conflict itself:
I like how it has not only the part about detecting conflicts, but also an
interface to see conflicting items, propose a solution and try to find the
right time; that's many steps ahead. I would be fine with just being able
to *detect* conflicts, but I see how detecting+resolving can be useful to
many people.
I like how you included the part about having breathing time or „coffee
breaks“ between tasks. This is all very user-friendly.
I'm not sure about the entry point; that is, how to invoke the conflict
resolution step. From the documentation and from using it, it seems that
you must actively say „right now I'd like to write a date to see whether it
would conflict with anything“; this is a use case I never have thought of
or needed previously. My needs have rather been:
1) „right now I'd like to schedule a task“ (hopefully at a date which
doesn't create conflicts). That means, I'd prefer if the conflict
resolution happened as part of the normal C-c C-s scheduling process,
instead of an optional step that you must remember to invoke with C-c C-c.
Reschedulings (including rescheduling after a repetition) should be subject
to the same checks. Even if this means having to wait more. I think you
could provide some code or instructions about how to make automatic checks
after C-c C-s (maybe only if the specified date includes a duration)
2) from time to time I wish I could check not only 1 timestamp, but
*all* my existing appointments (mainly the future ones) for conflicts. This
means comparing each one against each other! (including repetitions) or
producing a timeline and checking for overlaps. This is very hard, I know!
And the interactive part (seeing proposed resolutions) is heavy because
there are infinite possible resolutions. This turns very fast into an
optimization problem
An issue that makes org-conflict less helpful than it could is that it only
works for agenda appointments that have a duration. You implemented a
default duration for the *new* event (the one just inputted) and then
compare this event against all existing agenda events *that have a duration*.
But I think that *all* agenda events should have a default duration too
(because in real life, no task takes 0 minutes). So the new event should be
compared against all future timestamps, not only those with a duration.
This is slower, I know.
Actually, a better way to implement this would be: let's forget about
durations and just take the day, not the hour. If you want to schedule an
event at day X, and there's already another event at day X (no duration
specified), let's call this a conflict and prevent scheduling a second one.
If you don't want to consider it a conflict (because you really plan to do
both things the same day) then you should be required to choose a time for
the existing event, and then another time (non-conflicting) for the new
event. This experiment may help in teaching the user to do better planning,
i.e. if you want to do many things the same day, choose at which times.
I tried to implement some programs to do similar things, and to get some
useful information from my org agenda (which is a mess because of too many
tasks). Like for instance, I take a list of tasks, „enhance them“ with
scheduling information like a default duration and a deadline, and then I
add the human requirements that org doesn't know about: for instance
complaining if there are more than 24 h of work in a day (actually I delay
them to the next day), or adding pauses for lunch or for sleep (this will
also shift everything forwards). This is all more complex than expected and
in the end I'm doing the processing outside org; actually I prefer to use a
very simple list (1. x, 2. yy, 3. , …) in an org file to do my
planning, and ignore org-mode
