3 ms·

I kinda wish for a mix of todo/calendar system where I could say, for example "remind me of this maintenance task in 6 months" and it would disappear out of any

by ilyt 3y ago

I kinda wish for a mix of todo/calendar system where I could say, for example "remind me of this maintenance task in 6 months" and it would disappear out of anything directly visible for that 6 months then pop up in todo list without due date, as just a thing to do. Calendars are good for stuff that needs to be done at this exact date and hour but not great if it is just some routine maintenance task that can be easily shifted a month in any direction (say "replace oil and filters on car")

ghaff 3y ago
> I kinda wish for a mix of todo/calendar system I imagine there are various ways you can do this with existing tools. I just mostly find it useful to separate calendaring from needs to be done in the next month or two from bigger/more aspirational/not fully defined projects. So I generally (if loosely) separate them into different spaces. The main thing IMO is not to put stuff with loose (and maybe never) dates on your calendar where you now have 50 overdue items on your calendar which just encourages never wrapping anything up. (Worked with someone like that once.)
- TeMPOraL 3y ago
  > The main thing IMO is not to put stuff with loose (and maybe never) dates on your calendar where you now have 50 overdue items on your calendar which just encourages never wrapping anything up. Thank you. This killed all my attempts at planning using Org Mode and agenda views. I'd schedule a few things for the day, and then invariably fail to do half of them, and then they would show up on next day's agenda, sorting above that day's planned tasks, and displayed with emphasis. This was both distracting and created an "emotional repulsion field" for the agenda view, leading to more tasks not completed, and a week down the line, my agenda view would have 20+ items due days ago. The second-to-last time around, I started pushing due dates on those incomplete tasks into the future. But this didn't help anything - soon enough, I'd be staring at an incoming blast wave of random uncompleted tasks, which I then had to push back again some more. The system eventually collapsed under the emotional weight. Last time around, I forced myself to simply unschedule such incomplete tasks - remove due dates from them entirely. But that only cut to the thing I still haven't figured out (one of many such things): how to represent tasks that have some temporal component to them, but a fuzzy or flexible one. Like, "do X anywhere between next Friday and Tuesday in the week after - but I don't want to be reminded of X before that very Friday". Or, "do X somewhere between September and November". Basically, trying to walk a narrow line between the system being not specific enough to be useful, and being so overwhelming that it actually makes everything worse.
  - ghaff 3y ago
    My approach, quite frankly, has been either my weekly hardcopy calendar or the whiteboard in my kitchen. And keeping my Google Calendar as a calendar. So I have my actual calendar and things I need to deal with at some point in the near or indefinite future. Not saying it's the right approach but virtual/physical separation works for me.
  - ilyt 3y ago
    I was actually pretty happy with Org mode except that one teeeny problem of it being only really usable in Emacs as everything else using that format missed this or that feature that I wanted/used. > Thank you. This killed all my attempts at planning using Org Mode and agenda views. I'd schedule a few things for the day, and then invariably fail to do half of them, and then they would show up on next day's agenda, sorting above that day's planned tasks, and displayed with emphasis. This was both distracting and created an "emotional repulsion field" for the agenda view, leading to more tasks not completed, and a week down the line, my agenda view would have 20+ items due days ago. org-mode kinda worked for me. It had SCHEDULED and DEADLINE types, first being basically "when I can start doing something" (maintenance etc.), second being "when I NEED to do it" (pay bills etc). Sometimes both. I didn't use timestamps at all for most tasks, just priority, those were basically mostly for long term stuff or monthly-repeatable > But this didn't help anything - soon enough, I'd be staring at an incoming blast wave of random uncompleted tasks, which I then had to push back again some more. The system eventually collapsed under the emotional weight. That just sounds like amount of tasks was higher than time available, no system gonna fix that. I actually found the org-mode showing how many times a given scheduled date was missed was fair indicator whether to look at that task or whether it should be there at all.
- ilyt 3y ago
  > I imagine there are various ways you can do this with existing tools Yeah but I'd like same functionality to be accessible from mobile, my Linux machine GUI and CLI so entirely PITA to make. And honestly I already have too many "fix my own itch" projects...
mejutoco 3y ago
Todoist does exactly that. You can also say "every day at 12:00 for a week" or "every second sun of the month".

by ilyt 3y ago

ghaff 3y ago

> I kinda wish for a mix of todo/calendar system I imagine there are various ways you can do this with existing tools. I just mostly find it useful to separate calendaring from needs to be done in the next month or two from bigger/more aspirational/not fully defined projects. So I generally (if loosely) separate them into different spaces. The main thing IMO is not to put stuff with loose (and maybe never) dates on your calendar where you now have 50 overdue items on your calendar which just encourages never wrapping anything up. (Worked with someone like that once.)

TeMPOraL 3y ago
> The main thing IMO is not to put stuff with loose (and maybe never) dates on your calendar where you now have 50 overdue items on your calendar which just encourages never wrapping anything up. Thank you. This killed all my attempts at planning using Org Mode and agenda views. I'd schedule a few things for the day, and then invariably fail to do half of them, and then they would show up on next day's agenda, sorting above that day's planned tasks, and displayed with emphasis. This was both distracting and created an "emotional repulsion field" for the agenda view, leading to more tasks not completed, and a week down the line, my agenda view would have 20+ items due days ago. The second-to-last time around, I started pushing due dates on those incomplete tasks into the future. But this didn't help anything - soon enough, I'd be staring at an incoming blast wave of random uncompleted tasks, which I then had to push back again some more. The system eventually collapsed under the emotional weight. Last time around, I forced myself to simply unschedule such incomplete tasks - remove due dates from them entirely. But that only cut to the thing I still haven't figured out (one of many such things): how to represent tasks that have some temporal component to them, but a fuzzy or flexible one. Like, "do X anywhere between next Friday and Tuesday in the week after - but I don't want to be reminded of X before that very Friday". Or, "do X somewhere between September and November". Basically, trying to walk a narrow line between the system being not specific enough to be useful, and being so overwhelming that it actually makes everything worse.
- ghaff 3y ago
  My approach, quite frankly, has been either my weekly hardcopy calendar or the whiteboard in my kitchen. And keeping my Google Calendar as a calendar. So I have my actual calendar and things I need to deal with at some point in the near or indefinite future. Not saying it's the right approach but virtual/physical separation works for me.
- ilyt 3y ago
  I was actually pretty happy with Org mode except that one teeeny problem of it being only really usable in Emacs as everything else using that format missed this or that feature that I wanted/used. > Thank you. This killed all my attempts at planning using Org Mode and agenda views. I'd schedule a few things for the day, and then invariably fail to do half of them, and then they would show up on next day's agenda, sorting above that day's planned tasks, and displayed with emphasis. This was both distracting and created an "emotional repulsion field" for the agenda view, leading to more tasks not completed, and a week down the line, my agenda view would have 20+ items due days ago. org-mode kinda worked for me. It had SCHEDULED and DEADLINE types, first being basically "when I can start doing something" (maintenance etc.), second being "when I NEED to do it" (pay bills etc). Sometimes both. I didn't use timestamps at all for most tasks, just priority, those were basically mostly for long term stuff or monthly-repeatable > But this didn't help anything - soon enough, I'd be staring at an incoming blast wave of random uncompleted tasks, which I then had to push back again some more. The system eventually collapsed under the emotional weight. That just sounds like amount of tasks was higher than time available, no system gonna fix that. I actually found the org-mode showing how many times a given scheduled date was missed was fair indicator whether to look at that task or whether it should be there at all.
ilyt 3y ago
> I imagine there are various ways you can do this with existing tools Yeah but I'd like same functionality to be accessible from mobile, my Linux machine GUI and CLI so entirely PITA to make. And honestly I already have too many "fix my own itch" projects...

mejutoco 3y ago

Todoist does exactly that. You can also say "every day at 12:00 for a week" or "every second sun of the month".