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Show HN: A better way to timeblock your day
- rememberlenny 5y agoVery neat primitive. Congrats on getting it out!
- mattcrail 5y agoThanks! We are excited to have it out in the world, and I've really loved using it myself. I never did timeblocking/timeboxing effectively before, but it really has changed how productive and focused I am each day.
- mlejva 5y agoWhat has worked for you to make timeblocking actually effective?
- mattcrail 5y agoFor me it was about making it simple and always present. Before I would have to copy and paste things into Google calendar from my project management tool or task manager, and then I would constantly be switching back and forth between the two tools. Now, all my tasks from my project managers are in Taskable, as is my calendar. I don't have to switch between the two, and I can do all my daily planning in one place. So now that its quick and easy to do the timeblocking/timeboxing, I find myself staying on top of it more, and also readjusting how I spend my time throughout the day. I wrote a blog post on my new productivity routine with timeblocking if helpful: https://taskablehq.com/blog/productivity-system-2021 https://taskablehq.com/blog/productivity-system-2021
- gandalfff 5y agoI've been looking for a tool to reduce the friction of timeblocking. I find that my estimate for how long things take is often wildly incorrect. Does this tool address those scenarios? I will give Taskable a try this week. Congrats!
- mattcrail 5y agoAwesome - excited to hear your feedback. We do indeed reduce friction through the integrations, bringing your calendar together with tasks from project management tools like Jira, Shorcut, Trello, GitHub, Asana, Slack, and even email. In terms of helping you do better estimation - we aren't addressing that directly yet with this first version. However, we do have plans to build in better insights/analytics that will help you better understand where your time is being spent, and how accurate you are with your estimations (time allotted versus time spent). We'd even love to build a feature that learns and begins to suggest expected time for certain tasks.
- egypturnash 5y agoI've been timeblocking on paper for years with the Pomodoro method. One crucial part of that method that's easy to overlook is the part where you look back at your records when you finish a thing and see how long it took to actually make it, versus your initial estimates; doing this helps you develop a sense of how long this kind of task will actually take! One major leap in this for me has been developing a habit of also tracking time spent on a project somewhere in the project itself; I'm an artist, and every piece I work on now has a layer called "tracking" with a bunch of little hash-marks representing a half-hour of work, with other annotations like the date and maybe what part of complex pieces I was working on. It's now really easy to look back and say "this drawing with a complicated library background took 7h".
- mattcrail 5y agoYeah - I find this super important too. I readjust my calendar entries based on actual time I spent on something so I can reflect on it later in the day. As mentioned, we are going to add in insights/analytics for this reason
- smhenderson 5y agoLooks like it could be helpful but after spending over two minutes looking for pricing and not finding it I'll never know. I refuse to even try a product that won't be upfront about pricing. Don't 1) tell me I can get two months free, 2) offer to let me take a test drive or 3) ask for my email address before you've given me a chance to review your standard price model. I'm sure in the long run I am missing out on some really cool things but I started noticing this trend of hiding pricing to force engagement years ago and I have gotten to a point where I simply refuse to play along. Happy to hear I'm wrong and there is an obvious "Check out our prices!" link that I just completely missed...
- mattcrail 5y agoHey thanks for the feedback. We are certainly not trying to hide the pricing - as it happens we created a new landing page specifically for this new feature and I forgot to put the pricing on it (I'll do that now). Our pricing currently has a free tier where you don't get any of the premium integrations, or a $5 tier where you do. However, we are changing it to a flat $10 per month pricing plan next week so you can get a bit of a deal for the next 6 months if you sign up now.
- smhenderson 5y agoThanks for letting me know, that's pricing that tells me I should spend more time looking into your product. And for the record, I wasn't trying to single you out or pick on your site - I find myself getting more and more impatient with company's not being upfront about their pricing over the years so it's basically the first thing I look for these days.
- mattcrail 5y agoI agree 100% - this happened to me yesterday in fact when we were looking at Paddle for payment/subscription processing and signing up/finding out the pricing required speaking with sales, so we decided to not keep looking into it.
- deleted 5y ago
- jeremyis 5y agoCan’t you accomplish this by just making calendar events? What am I missing?
- mattcrail 5y agoYou can, but it requires a lot more admin of copying and pasting tasks/descriptions into your calendar from your task or project manager, and having to maintain/update in two separate tools. For people not using task or project managers, often the calendar is enough (and indeed becomes their task manager). However, if you have tasks coming from everywhere, we make it super easy to do timeblocking quickly/efficiently.
- augustwollter 5y agoI really like the look of this, and just played around with it. Thanks for listening to my feedback as well Matt, looking forward to see how Taskable evolves.
- mattcrail 5y agoThanks for trying it out and sharing feedback! We love to hear from users, particularly about things we can improve on so appreciate you taking the time.
- NikolaNovak 5y agoIgnorant question - but I assume this is not something that those of us stuck in "Enterprise IT / Big Corpo" can easily benefit from? * I don't see Outlook/Exchange as part of Integrations (let alone more fun stuff like Lotus Notes etc :P) * I assume it'd be essentially impossible to open ports, gain permission, pass security task list, bribe system administrators and security control officers etc for individual to integrate this into their enterprise email system
- mattcrail 5y agoHey Nikola - we don't yet support Outlook but it's something we are planning to do in the next couple weeks. Indeed you are right - we've generally steered away from enterprise users because of those reasons, and instead target startups/SMEs because generally the person using our product is also an admin. However, we do want to target enterprises eventually so at some point we'll have to figure all that out.
- sdoering 5y agoSadly exactly my thought stuck in MSO 365 outlook for corporate life. And havi g multiple clients with different stakeholders and multiple projects per client is calendar hell in itself.
- nefitty 5y agoI haven't used this app. I had to make my own similar tool. Anyways, timeblocking changed my life. It was a slog at first. I started off by logging what I actually did. "Sit on couch - 12:15 - 4:30" "Walk dog - 4:30 - 4:45" "Sit on couch - 4:45 - 7:00" Seeing the patterns I had fallen into was like looking into some sort of chronographic mirror. My fourth dimensional beer belly had gotten pretty big. Put my ballot in the "What gets measured gets managed" box.
- mattcrail 5y agoAbsolutely - it's really interesting to reflect on where your time has gone
- krono 5y agoTime Blocking is a terrible name for the concept. Of the two ways you could interpret it, one makes you feel like Kronos the Lord of Time, and the other will make you hate your calendar/agenda and everything you put on there. What does not work: Blocking time. The world will not adapt to how you planned it last Sunday, and no amount of wanting, asking, or even demanding will make it so. Time is fluid, people are selfish, your dog is colourblind and can't read. What can work: Blocks of time. An estimation of how the day will go but probably won't. A suggestion to yourself. It is wrong from the outset, but still good enough for you to estimate what tasks could be taken on, maybe discover some efficiency opportunities, and it indicates visually that yes, that thing is due in two days.
- mattcrail 5y agoI would have agreed with you a couple months ago, and we didn't ever plan to build this feature. But a lot of users requested it, and I started doing it myself, and it does actually work really well for me to timebox specific tasks rather than timeblock chunks of my day. I never followed the latter when I tried it, but when I have timeboxed specific tasks in my calendar it works for me and for a lot of our users as well.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- ergonaught 5y agoI’ve used time blocking for years, and it’s worked precisely to the extent that I actually used it, and the world assuredly adapted. I wasn’t suffering from a delusion that I could control how every minute of every day was utilized, however.
- davidw 5y agoI get anxious when I have some kind of ... time thing coming up. Meeting, have to go get a kid from school... it just sits there churning up cycles in my brain. It's the enemy of "flow".
- mattcrail 5y agoIt's definitely not for everyone. I actually get motivation from having the deadline coming up to buckle down and try to finish the thing I am doing in the time allotted. So for me it helps with flow, but I understand that isn't universal for.
- davidw 5y agoA deadline like "Friday" can have that effect, but not something like "10:25".
- mawise 5y agoI remember trying out Getting Things Done, really liking the idea, and then finding out I had only crappy ways to reference an email from my "todo list". Enough of my "work" is "respond to this email" that I've never been able to escape my inbox as one of my todo lists. Any ideas on how to build task planning that lets me include link directly to an email?
- mattcrail 5y agoYeah - I know that problem well. We have a Gmail integration where you can star an email, and then it syncs to Taskable as a task (and links back to the original email). Once checked off, it also archives the gmail message. That way you can star things that require follow up, and get to them later, and archive the rest. We have a lot more to build on the email side of things - such as surfacing important emails for you, or even being able to respond quickly to emails right from Taskable so you go to your inbox less, where you can get sucked down rabbit holes very easily.
- goplayoutside 5y agoI don't see Fastmail on your roadmap. Do you intend to eventually support Fastmail? As I'm sure you're aware, lots of us have migrated away from GMail.
- tomjen3 5y agoSell your soul to the ghost of Steve Jobs. In mail, select some of the text of the email, then share to reminders. This creates a reminder with the selected text and a link to the email. This also works in iOS.
- mcovalt 5y agoYou can also drag an email from Mail to Reminders. I drag email from Mail and links from Safari into Reminders all the time.
- hesk 5y agoI guess that my setup is extremely tailored to my needs but it requires very little setup so here it goes. I use Emacs Org-Mode for my todo lists and the default macOS Mail.app for email. On a Mac, Org-Mode has a tool that grabs the currently selected email and inserts a link to the message id into the Org buffer. Clicking on that link opens the message in Mail.app. I try to clean out my email inbox every evening. I track emails that need additional work in Org-Mode and immediately move them to the email archive after I created the link.
- sdoering 5y agoCool solution. Sadly not for ne stuck in corporate firewalled MS Outlook. But I love to see when somebody builds stuff to solve a problem. And I believe that at least I can cheer them on and wish the best for them. Congrats.
- mattcrail 5y agoThanks! We are going to add Outlook soon but nothing we can do about the firewall for the time being
- garrickvanburen 5y agoJust stop using a To Do List separate from the calendar itself. No need for an extra tool for this.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- gazelle21 5y agoThis looks great and looking to move from sunsama due to pricing. I don't see an easy way to delete task? I imported a template as test but can't seem to delete task?
- mattcrail 5y agoHey - you can archive tasks using the bulk editing function https://www.loom.com/share/239fa635bbd045eb87343810bb155dfb https://www.loom.com/share/239fa635bbd045eb87343810bb155dfb
- joshka 5y agoLooks neat. Some alternatives in a similar space (tasks -> time blocking) - Noteplan 3 - https://noteplan.co/ https://noteplan.co/ - DayCaptain - https://daycaptain.com/ https://daycaptain.com/
- cientifico 5y agoThis exact feature exist also in the pro(2€/month) version of https://ticktick.com/ https://ticktick.com/
- fapi1974 5y agoMake this collaborative and you've got yourself something fundable: https://www.finsmes.com/2022/01/clockwise-raises-45m-in-series-c-funding.html https://www.finsmes.com/2022/01/clockwise-raises-45m-in-seri...
- mattcrail 5y agoWe are planning team features down the line - right now trying to stay laser-focused on individual users :)
- irrational 5y ago> that way no one can schedule a meeting in your focus time. LOL. Oh my sweet summer child. I so wish I lived in your fantasy land where this was remotely true. My experience has been that everyone assumes their stuff is more important than your stuff, so you will reschedule your stuff to make way for their stuff. I’ve worked in a number of places professionally for 25 years and I’ve never seen different.
- mattcrail 5y agoWe generally mean with things like calendly, but this tends to work in smaller teams I've worked in. Not 100 percent of the time of course.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- mopierotti 5y agoAs an alternative, I use Sunsama, which also lets you drag tasks directly to your calendar. (I have not tried Taskable)
- TheSocialAndrew 5y agoNot to hijack your thread, I'll give this a try, but I've recently started using Sorted for this type of task management and the feature I find most important is the ability to shift the time blocks easily just by selecting them and scrolling the mouse cursor to defer them all to a later time by +30 minutes, +1 hour, etc.
- mattcrail 5y agoI was just thinking about this actually because I had something cancelled in the afternoon and wanted to just move everything forward by two hours. We'll add it to the roadmap!
- haney 5y agoI've been using reclaim.ai for time blocking and really liking it. One additional feature reclaim.ai has is "smart" 1:1s which help me to schedule recurring meetings with my team (which is super helpful with our WFH global team). There seem to be several calendar management apps competing in this space right now, excited to see more productivity features being built from the competition.
- kirubakaran 5y agoRelated free tool (mine) : https://crushentropy.com/ https://crushentropy.com/ It's like markdown for planning your day.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- jasfi 5y agoYour tool could use a UX designer to make it look better.
- kirubakaran 5y agoThanks for the feedback! I agree.
- ziggus 5y agoI've seen a lot of these kinds of tools come and go, and this one looks as good if not better than most of the others. However, they're all missing out on a huge market: people in delegate or what's normally known as "Executive Assistant" roles, who are managing someone else's calendar and need a way to control what calendar items, invitations, responses, etc. their executives are seeing. I have yet to see any tool that serves that market at all. If there was a tool that could help people in those kinds of roles, particularly if there was functionality to 'automatically' setup meetings a la Doodle (which is garbage), it would sell like hotcakes.
- azeirah 5y agoAs someone with ADHD who was never taught how to handle time.. I think something like this would be very valuable. I don't need _better_ ways to timeblock my day, I need _any_ way to timeblock my days that actually works...
- unethical_ban 5y agoHm, just today I did something I don't normally do, which is timeblock my day! As in not just the meetings I have, but wrote down my plan for all the time in between. Now, I haven't gotten to all of them and some things slipped. I have the luxury of that not being a huge issue. Still, it felt good knowing that whenever I thought to myself "I should be doing something" I already had one and only one thing on deck at a given time, literally.
- jbjbjbjb 5y agoWhat do you mean by “works”? You could do it with pencil and a piece of paper.
- openknot 5y agoA pen and paper is what I typically use, especially when stuck on a task. But to think about how to timeblock in a way that "works" (I interpret this means, "is effective at keeping one spent on worthwhile tasks), I think the behaviours matter more than the tool (paper/software/or otherwise). The biggest habits to make time blocking work I see would be: i) Checking the system (paper/software) regularly) ii) Capturing all the to-dos, and making sure none are just floating in the mind iii) Having clear reminders for deadlines and prompts to review tasks that aren't working in a while When I use a time blocking system well, I'm good at getting lots of tasks done. The biggest obstacles are when a task takes a lot longer than anticipated due to complexity; if I fall behind and don't check the manager; or if I schedule some tasks for someday/far-in-the-future, then forget to review them regularly. So in short, I think most systems work (with cloud sync and organizational features for software systems as an added luxury), but the biggest obstacle to effectiveness is not checking it enough, often caused by feeling overwhelmed with tasks. Solutions to this include: committing to less, taking breaks, and staying healthy with exercise & sleep for the basics.
- dmje 5y agoThe landing page looks promising but downloaded the Android app and it's terrifyingly bad. In fact mobile support in general just seems terrible, so I guess I'm out.
- mattcrail 5y agoYeah we are a small team so haven't been able to properly build out mobile yet. The apps are really to make it easy to add new tasks and view your existing ones. We'd love to grow the team and work on mobile soon.
- tgdnt 5y agoThere was an app called Timeful that got acquihired by Google who promptly shut it down. What that app did that was actually good was you could have a simple todo list and you could drag it to your calendar, just like your app. They went on and on about "AI" and how they were going to blow everyone's minds at Google, but all many of us wanted was just a good old drag and drop. Timeful was only on mobile, and had an extremely simple interface. I think it just had one view, tasks on top, today's agenda below them. Another important thing was that you could kind of set aside events in your calendar, so they would show up as just a line on the left side of the agenda view, for events that don't actually tie you up, so you can still put some todo in.
- sdfhbdf 5y agoHow does this compare to the Focus time feature built into Google Calendar in Google Workspace? https://support.google.com/calendar/answer/11190973 https://support.google.com/calendar/answer/11190973
- KristiMKE 5y ago