Show HN: A better way to timeblock your day | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: A better way to timeblock your day

taskablehq.com

86 pointsmattcrail75 comments

There 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.

I sometimes think cloning popular services that have been acquired and shut down could be a viable business.

Tick tick can do this. Love the app. Super simple yet snappy.

I'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.

I'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.

As 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...

Hm, 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.

What do you mean by “works”? You could do it with pencil and a piece of paper.

A 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.

I see that in the GTD approach with the emphasis it has on the weekly review and trusting the inbox. But I don’t think there are any easy solutions for that, you just have to dedicate the time.

they're all missing out on a huge market

That doesn't sound like a huge market. Very few people have an assistant these days. That sounds like a few tens of thousands of potential customers, although admittedly ones able to afford a high premium.

> That doesn't sound like a huge market.

"Huge" is NaN, so I did a Google and the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics says the TAM is half a million Executive Secretaries and Executive Administrative Assistants in the United States alone.

I agree with the individual points of your comment, but speculate that the market could still be big enough to be profitable. This is mainly due to a popular HN thread about executive assistants from this November: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29336234

I don't think I would ever get an executive assistant, even if I were to someday be in a place to afford one. Hypothetically speaking, I get the idea that frugality can be a burden, and it sometimes makes sense to spend money to save time.

However, I personally value making the time and practicing the skill of prioritizing tasks for myself. I just generally like to be self-reliant when I have the option.

"Very few people have an assistant these days."

Uh, frankly, you don't know what you're talking about. Just because the people you work with don't, doesn't mean that your experience is universal.

Most execs or C-level employees are going to have at least one exec assistant, if not more.

That's an interesting space. Our current users tend to be working at earlier stage startups so we don't hear a lot about EAs but certainly for enterprise clients I could see how this would be a killer feature.

It's a very common complaint amongst EAs; there's a LOT of time management tools, but they're all geared towards an individual managing their own time.

Imagine the work you have to do to manage a busy calendar, then multiply it by 10. Then add in responsibility for booking travel, managing events, managing multiple email accounts, etc. for a number of people, and you can start to imagine how amazing it would be to have better tools to do something like managing an exec's calendar.

I speak from (limited) experience: my wife is an EA and sometimes I show her tools like this and she always asks 'can it handle delegate roles?', and every time I have to concede that, no, they don't.

I 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?

Yeah - 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.

I 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.

Sell 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.

You can also drag an email from Mail to Reminders. I drag email from Mail and links from Safari into Reminders all the time.

I 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.

Maybe search for Tiago Forte's "PARA" system and "one-touch inbox"; his workflows might not be precisely what you described ("task planning that lets me include link directly to an email") but I bet you'd find inspiration to facilitate your "escape". Good luck!

You can do this in Outlook, just create a task and drop the email in as an attachment. Or just flag the email.

Google actually nailed feature this with their Tasks feature in Gmail ("Add Email to Tasks") ... but the rest of the task application is so basic and ridiculously underdeveloped that there's no point even going there.

Google, your Tasks app is cr@p ...

Common problem, I think. I wrote an Outlook macro that saves the email message to a folder and puts the link to it in the clipboard, then I just paste it into Vimwiki. That way in the mail application I can archive it, delete it, whatever. Works well also for those messages you want to save for some vague reason but have no related action item right now.

Check out Legend (formerly moo.do): https://legendapp.com/

Found it several years ago and used it regularly for a while. It has a nice mixed model for blending calendar, email, lists, tasks. Lots of drag and drop capability, keyboard shortcuts. Loads fast. Mobile app. Customizable views you can quickly switch between, e.g. 3 column email on left, tasks in the middle, calendar on the right.

I 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".

It'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.

A deadline like "Friday" can have that effect, but not something like "10:25".

I 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.

Absolutely - it's really interesting to reflect on where your time has gone

I'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!

Awesome - 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.

I'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".

Yeah - 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

Ignorant 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

Hey 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.

Sadly 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.

I 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.

Thanks 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.

Not 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.

I 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!

Make this collaborative and you've got yourself something fundable: https://www.finsmes.com/2022/01/clockwise-raises-45m-in-seri...

We are planning team features down the line - right now trying to stay laser-focused on individual users :)

How does this compare to the Focus time feature built into Google Calendar in Google Workspace? https://support.google.com/calendar/answer/11190973

Looks neat. Some alternatives in a similar space (tasks -> time blocking)

- Noteplan 3 - https://noteplan.co/

- DayCaptain - https://daycaptain.com/

This exact feature exist also in the pro(2€/month) version of https://ticktick.com/

Can’t you accomplish this by just making calendar events? What am I missing?

You 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.

Cool 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.

Thanks! We are going to add Outlook soon but nothing we can do about the firewall for the time being

The 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.

Yeah 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.

Very neat primitive. Congrats on getting it out!

Thanks! 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.

As an alternative, I use Sunsama, which also lets you drag tasks directly to your calendar. (I have not tried Taskable)

What has worked for you to make timeblocking actually effective?

For 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

Looks 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...

Hey 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.

Thanks 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.

I 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.

Big Amen from me, I was just about to write the same thing.

No pricing page means it’s possible I’ll end up needing to talk to a sales rep or they’ll end up wanting a subscription for any meaningful features.

Time 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.

I 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.

I’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.

> 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.

We 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.

Just stop using a To Do List separate from the calendar itself.

No need for an extra tool for this.

This 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?

Hey - you can archive tasks using the bulk editing function https://www.loom.com/share/239fa635bbd045eb87343810bb155dfb

Related free tool (mine) : https://crushentropy.com/

It's like markdown for planning your day.

Your tool could use a UX designer to make it look better.

Thanks for the feedback! I agree.

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