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Comment by windsurfer | Hacker News Reader

The idea is to print out a sheet, cut it in half, and fold them in half twice. You write your weekly plans on the left pane, and your agenda on the right. The grey area marks roughly when it is dark out. I didn't include between 0000 and 0600 as I figured it took up too much space and isn't useful for an agenda.

It's an Inkscape SVG, by the way. I'd love to hear about any forks :)

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Perhaps you could post the SVG, so we can edit it to make Monday the first day of the week like ISO 8601 intended it :)

ahem

http://github.com/windsurfer/Pocket-To-Do

Aw, that kind of deflates my joke!

My installation of Inkscape (latest version) wouldn't open the SVG, by the way (not that I have an actual need to edit it).

Hm, what is the error? I can open it in Ubuntu and XP.

Works fine now. I had downloaded the SVG the same way as I did the files in the downloads area (by right-clicking and 'save link as...'), but in the source file case this retrieves a webpage, not the SVG file. Sorry about that.

While I like the general idea of your 'schedule as a bar chart' solution, I see several issues:

1) There is very little space to write down appointments. I'd like to be able to write down at least a name and a location, even for a 30-minute appointment.

2) What about moved or cancelled appointments? I'm afraid things will get messy very soon.

3) How should I handle overlapping appointments?

Maybe I'm not the target audience, but I encounter these things daily.

There's a lot of space around the daily timelines. For appointments I'd suggest marking it in the timeline using a letter or perhaps initials then making a note in the TODO area with the details. If the timing of the appointment would make that difficult (e.g. a 15 minute appointment, or an appointment that starts and ends at :30, putting the line for the hour division in the middle) then simply mark the appointment time appropriately and adding a note above or below the time with the letter or initials which ties in to the appointment details.

If you happen to have more than half a dozen appointments per week and have routine issues like moved, cancelled, or overlapped appointments then a simple tool like this is unlikely to meet your needs, you'd be better off with an application for a smart phone or somesuch.

For a back-pocket planner, I think it's nice and simple. Clearly it's not intended to incorporate all the features of a dayrunner or whatever. It's just a simple todo list + time-blocking.

1) The space is adequate if your appointments tend to be short eg Bob and Cathy or lunch and not complex like Bob, Cathy, sys-eng group rep. re: develop timeline to cost out and deploy new server cluster for foobar project (see 3/10/2010 emails "foobar server" and 3/5/2010 "how do I price a webserver?". 6th floor conference room (call in number 1-888-555-1111 p:142678)

2) The downside of any paper-based time planning is that it gets messy if you need to change things very often.

3) If you have overlapping appointments very often then I think you need to fix a more fundamental problem with your scheduling.

Unless you are some sort of genius, it seems really unlikely that you can seriously pay attention to more than one thing or person at a time. By trying to split your attention, there's a good chance you are less useful than you would be if you told one of your appointments to take a hike.

Yes, I agree it would be a nice way to do some personal time boxing ("How do I divide my free time between projects A, B and C"). But as I already noted in the parent post, this layout simply does not suit my kind of appointments.

However, I think most people in my situation would be able to use a daily version of this.

Three bars of six hours each: morning, afternoon and evening, for example. The additional height would allow me to write down overlapping appointments, and the extra width gives me room to write down some details. And in case of major messiness, I need to copy only one day to a new page.

re 1) Your example is ridiculous, but I really do need a first or last name and a location. Even for 30-minute appointments.

re 2) But there is quite a difference between changing a five into a six, or somehow moving an appointment in the bar chart.

re 3) I don't actually try to be in two places at the same time. It's usually just meetings and presentations I want even should attend, but simply overlap with other appointments. I do still want to know about them, so I can go but leave early, or drop in at a later time.

I personally carry a notebook around with me to write down ideas and stuff, but this has potential from the planning perspective.

Is there anything keeping you from printing these out double sided to save on paper?

No, nothing. I personally use a heavy ink pen that bleeds through normal paper however.

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