Sorted 3: Tasks and calendar events in a unified timeline | Hacker News Reader

Sorted 3: Tasks and calendar events in a unified timeline

sortedapp.com

69 pointsEugeleo75 comments

A bit unrelated but I wish just once I'd like to see normal calendar items and life activities - drop kids off to kindergarden, go shopping, mow the grass, help friend move - instead of these "mediate, finish presentation, finalize mood board concepts"

It's the same thing with most tech these days. Just try thinking of examples for voice assistants or any new tech.

Most of it has this weird "Friends" but with a "rich millenial from SF" flavor marketing to it. Everything is made to feel super-important and productive, yet casual.

It feels like they have a single persona:

"[Dave/Alice] lives in SF. After a busy day hustling, they chase their side gig doing [photography/art/music production]. Later on in the evening, they contact all of their friends using [platform] to go downtown for a [coffee/sushi/craft beer]. While on their [Uber/Lyft] ride, they check the [stock market / sport scores / wikipedia trivia].

Back home, they use the voice assistant on [platform] to dim the lights in their studio apartment and watch the newest TV show on [streaming service]"

Before bed, they finish the day by [meditating / reading a self-help book / listening to a self-improvement podcast]."

Perhaps the next business for that set would be “personal assistants, but remote gig worker”.

We considered about this angle, may be giving it a try in our next update

Companies like Apple and Amazon investing heavily in the sex-appeal of consumer electronics didn't help this either.

Best comment I've read for a while, thank you ;)

And to be fair, all marketing is aspirational. But outside of tech, the aspirational image involved running with your dog down the beach before eating dinner with friends and family on a scenic patio, which is somehow tangentially related to a vaguely named pharmaceutical product. And then you going kayaking while grinning ear to ear.

Is this silly? Yes, but it beats aspiring to work all the time.

This is something I hope my own work can avoid. I like the idea of building accessible and powerful tools for regular human beings. I don’t want it to be aimed towards some version of themselves people want to be. I suppose the intent is to inspire and motivate, especially in the context of scheduling and tasks.

My fear is that marketing to regular people won’t work, but I suppose the data will eventually reveal that.

The problem is that your calendar is probably tied to your work email which is tied to your company's Active Directory and the company definitely wants to be able to revoke your access. Email and calendar clients hardly even try to present a single view of contacts, events, and messages from distinct sources in a privacy preserving way. When they do support merging views, it seems like it's way too easy to send an invite to the wrong calendar or schedule over the top of busy block that just happens to be on a different calendar.

The entire idea of multiple calendars is a poor abstraction. People (you, me) have upcoming events that they care about; other people want to schedule events that don't conflict. Some events are public, some are private, and some are so private that they are transparent and nonblocking.

Somehow we made it way harder than it needed to be.

It’s the market. Normal people doing normal things don’t pay $35.99 for a todo list calendar app.

We found users who use Sorted³ extensively are busy people, both in their personal and professional areas.

busy people with taste*!

We use those examples in our page:

https://about.homechart.app

Homechart is similar to sorted but adds more "household" features like budgeting and recipes. Unlike sorted, you can self host it.

Seems pretty cool, but:

* i don't see a demo, it'd be nice

* is it US specific? seems like it is from the descriptions, but I'm not sure

I can give you access to a demo instance, we'll have a video soon (or would a demo instance be more helpful?). Contact info is in my profile.

We have some localization options available, unfortunately no translation options at the moment. It's mostly US centric, but we have users from Europe using it successfully.

To be fair, the biggest pockets might be these biz adopters. See how superhuman angles itself.

May be a mix of personal & professional life?

If this was a webapp I'd be willing to pay. I hadn't heard of Sorted before but I do this same technique of assigning a time estimate to every todo item and putting it on my calendar as an appointment. I have a side benefit of these task appointments blocking my calendar so other things can't get scheduled at the same time.

Probably the two biggest peace-of-mind boosts in my life have been this, and blocking of large chunks of time for deep/focused work.

>If this was a webapp I'd be willing to pay.

If this was a webapp, I'd skip it.

why?

Because I want the performance, battery friendliness, UI coherency, and more importantly the integration with native functionality that native apps offer.

So you want to use the app that the service has spent the most time polishing.

That seems obvious.

What doesn't it why you believe in today's web that that's impossible.

PWA is the way forward.

This is what I use it for! I got inspired by the book Make Time; I always have a lot of things on my plate, and I have a tendency to overfill my todo list with tasks which ultimately leads to me feeling bad for not managing to complete everything I set out to.

Things[1] has had this feature as long as I can remember. Just mentioning it since Sorted seems to be Mac/iOS only too and the title mentions this as its main feature.

[1] https://culturedcode.com/things/

Things does not let you assign durations to tasks, which is Sorted’s whole thing.

I noticed that Things clearly warns you when you import Reminders... that they will delete those imports from Reminders. Sorted doesn't appear to do the same. A big, bad oops IMO.

Observation: so many apps are just re-inventing subsets of Org-mode [1]. Conclusion: there is great potential in making Emacs more user-friendly.

[1] https://orgmode.org/

Absolutely. I’m a huge Emacs fan and org-mode still feels too complicated for me.

Ya big org-mode fan here.

I try to get everything I do as a TODO item. Add the link to the Jira item in the title. When it is marked as DONE, it adds a journal entry into Org-Roam/Daily file automatically.

Still haven't figured out how to use org-roam idiomatically.

An app that makes intelligent decisions about tasks and how to organize them would be welcome. But I think its a hard problem.

Tasks often require materials and procedures, kind of like a science lab. If you're going to cut the lawn, you might need more than the lawnmore. You might need canister of gas, hedge trimmers, gloves ... and so on. But it will also depend on the weather, if its rained or it rained the previous day, you might not be able to cut the grass. or the time will increase how long it takes you. If its too late in the day, it might be too dark, or you might not want to disrupt your neighbours, and so on. You might be out of gas and have to go buy some. You might not know where you left your trimmers last time. It just explodes into possibilities.

So I think an app with good task management, would make the user write out a check list of materials, and repeatable procedure like a science lab. Then at the end have the user write set reminders what they need to buy/do for the next time.

Might be interested but I would prefer it to use the system calendar and to-dos so that I can use it alongside these rather than instead of.

It actually does use the system calendar, but for todos, it only imports from a single list in Reminders, which is the same as Things 3. This makes me think it might be a limitation with Reminders' API or something.

The (from my point of view) canonical application like this is www.1soft.com's Above & Beyond. Sorted's hyperscheduling is a pale shadow of the fully implemented "Dynamic Scheduling" that A&B does.

I've been looking for an Android implementation for forever, but 1soft apparently doesn't care about platforms beyond Windows. A true shame.

Having worked with A&B when I used to be desktop bound years ago, it's almost painful to see some very few others stumbling around in the dark and almost getting to A&B's full algorithm.

I wish I had the confidence and tools to go ahead and build the Android version I want!

> scheduling on a calendar is not scaleable

> hyper scheduling

Um.. what?

I was a lot more interested in this product until I started reading the marketing copy. To me it reads like the worst of breed of Silicon Valley “solution looking for a problem speak”.

Yea .. I'm not quite sure I get what it does really .. it just looks like a calendar, but in a list?

See my other comment in this thread.

Yeah, I don't love their communication / marketing as well.

Basically, it is a todo manager, but with built-in first-class scheduling. You input your todos, assign time estimates, and Sorted helps you spread them out in your day, keeping your calendar events in mind.

To explain the value in this, let me copy one of my comments in this thread:

[...] Sorted is really great for people like myself who tend to overfill their todo lists, and subsequently feel bad at the end of the day when they don't manage to complete everything.

Sorted pushes me to assign time estimates to the task, which helps me to keep my todo-list for the day more realistic and manageable. I like it more than managing my todos directly in the calendar [...].

  > Basically, it is a todo manager, but with built-in first-class scheduling.
  > You input your todos, assign time estimates, and Sorted helps
  > you spread them out in your day, keeping your calendar events in mind.

So, it's like org-mode.

I didn't realize org could auto-plan your day for you. Any references?

Org-mode does present all the same information, but tasks are not automatically scheduled down to the minute. Though I would not be surprised if someone did write a script to micromanage every minute of the day.

If someone needs the tool to say "17:04 unplug laptop ; 17:05 place laptop in bag" then I think that they are spending too much time with their tools and need to spend more time doing the first thing on their list no matter if it has a timestamp or not.

This looks perfect for my brain. I like the idea of hyper scheduling, which seems to be automatically scheduling todos on your timeline, and automatically moving them around as life happens. Moving todos around manually in Google Calendar whenever you use more time than planned is a drag.

Same here. I've always wanted a timeline style scheduling program like this.

I've used a notebook exactly like this project, sort of a hybrid bullet note system. Eventually when work got too complicated I started doing the same thing in an RTF notes program.

But the biggest thing for me though is being able to add info VERY quickly without more than a few taps. Otherwise I'm just not going to bother with it.

My notes, I have a full keyboard and dedicated "open notes" button on my touch bar. Works excellent for me.

Reading scalable and hyperscheduling made me stressed, I don't need more things in my day. Maybe I just need a holiday...

Available on Linux/pure webapp?

AFAIK, no, unfortunately. But maybe if enough people request it...

Also per some other comments, if the integration is only with the Apple calendar and not Google calendar etc., then the whole point (of a non Apple platform) is moot.

You know what I like? The vast, bright desert of a white piece of paper in front of me and there I will write what I plan to do next.

And then I do it.

All these apps try to sell you on "if only you use me you will gain focus", however a piece of paper forces one to think about what is going to happen next. You can write a lot. Or nothing. Your choice.

If you're looking for a similar (free) native app for Linux devices, I highly recommend checking out Planner[0]! Super clean and pretty UI, it reminds me of an older build of Things with all the best features fleshed out. It also integrates with Todoist, which I'm unfortunately tied to at the moment. Making matters worse, it functions perfectly, giving me no reason to replace them in my stack :(

[0] https://appcenter.elementary.io/com.github.alainm23.planner/

Any chance this could work on Android?

Just in case the webdev's here, the link to the Mac App Store appears to be fatfingered:

> ... href="https://apps.apple.com/app/apple-store/id1306893526?pt=20288..." target=...

Tried it out, had an empty list to start. Pulled to refresh. Crashed.

I like the idea though, I like scheduling some things in calendar and others in reminders and like someone else mentioned; could be nice to work with both at once.

I know someone else mentioned Things, and I do own a copy but stopped using it as I didn’t like having tasks outside of the default Reminders app.

Hmm, importing reminders marks them as done in reminders? That’s no good. Also only limited to one reminders list?

Likewise, the app crashed for me on a fresh install as soon as I touched a task.

Things now integrates with Reminders.

I'm not really sure I would consider it an "integration", but more of an "import"... As far as I know, Things will move Reminders into your Inbox but it's then removed from Reminders entirely.

In contrast, I've been using GoodTask specifically because it integrates with Reminders (and keeps the tasks inside of Reminders too), mostly for the sync using my DAV server

Ugh, my bad. You’re right. It’s more of a reminders domination scheme than a cooperative feature. I wonder why Cultured Code decided to do it that way.

I’m the COO of the Team Sorted. Thanks Eugeleo for sharing Sorted³ here. I’m here to answer any question you may have for us.

In reading the comments, I have already learned a lot. There are some mentioned apps that we didn’t know. We also get inspired by some other ideas.

We’re a small remote team, but we’re doing our best to move fast. I appreciate the honest feedback and look forward to pick up your brains. Putting my comments in each thread.

Hmm, I've sort of accomplished this with Notion already, by working around in a single Calendar view with tasks written in pages and such.

Of course, this looks a lot smarter with proper calendar integrations and nifty time adjustment controls, but I actually just needed a Calendar view of things and with the rest working like a to-do list with the occasional power to backlink with existing pages.

Maybe I should give this a try.

For context, Sorted is one of the more prominent productivity apps in the Apple ecosystem. They also have what appears to be a pretty nice privacy policy, which would be my concern for these apps that want integration with your calendar information.

https://www.sortedapp.com/privacy

Seems odd there’s only Apple calendar sync, and no direct google calendar sync.

More ppl use the stock Apple calendars than you think. The advantages of google calendar disappeared once iCloud sync started working effortlessly.

I was unsure if I'm allowed to provide text context in a URL post. Thank you for doing that for me.

Apart from the nice privacy policy, Sorted is really great for people like myself who tend to overfill their todo lists, and subsequently feel bad at the end of the day when they don't manage to complete everything.

Sorted pushes me to assign time estimates to the task, which helps me to keep my todo-list for the day more realistic and manageable. I like it more than managing my todos in the calendar, as for example the Make Time people would probably like me to.

I use Sunsama for this already and have used Timepage (iOS app) in the past. Neither are free, but both have polish and extra features that imo make them worth what you do pay.

I'll check them out, thanks. Sorted is nice, but not on Things-level of polish.

Sunsama looks great. Is it in beta? I don't see any pricing info.

Plan (https://getplan.co/) is also very similar.

I also couldn’t find the pricing info, so I just blindly signed up for the closed beta. I’ve been guided through a short form, at the end of which I’ve learned that after a 14 day trial Sunsama will cost $20 a month (!), even for personal or any other non-commercial use.

Hah wow. I hope that's a typo.

This definitely helpful for some people, I also like the UI design. It looks modern and sleek.

To me it looks like they took most of their inspiration from Things 3

I'm not sure what problem this solves. single-person scheduling is pretty easy already. it seems the main value prop is that you can assign durations, but you can do that with a calendar already.

A lot of people are asking this! Clearly they could do some work on marketing and communication. Let me quote my other comment in this thread:

To explain the value in this, let me copy one of my comments in this thread:

[...] Sorted is really great for people like myself who tend to overfill their todo lists, and subsequently feel bad at the end of the day when they don't manage to complete everything. Sorted pushes me to assign time estimates to the task, which helps me to keep my todo-list for the day more realistic and manageable. I like it more than managing my todos directly in the calendar [...].

A time wasting animation delay before every single screen. A bit annoying for a "productivity app".

this looks useful...does anything like it exist for Android?

I've had my eyes open for anything that does real dynamic rescheduling, sadly, no one has rediscovered this.

See www.1soft.com, Above & Beyond does this rescheduling the real way, but it's only on Windows.

No Android version available, sad.

Android is on our roadmap

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