My problem with current day planner apps | Hacker News Reader

My problem with current day planner apps

1 pointmaleem6 comments

Hi folks,

Many ways to manage your day and be more productive. But here i speak on specific type of day planner apps. The one which list tasks one after another where the order matters. One popular app in this genre is “structured” app.

My problem is that they are not flexible enough to react to day changes, which ruin your plan quickly. As example you think you would spend one hour in a task, to find out it took 2 hours instead. Now i want the app to shift all tasks start times And see how this would affect the rest of my plan. Most importantly i want ways to quickly adjust the plan without making any calculations in my head. Sure, theres AI solutions like “motion” and “reclaimAI”. But they focus mainly on calendars adjustments and not a sequence of tasks that needs to be done in orderly manner.

What do you think, do i miss any apps doing the same thing ?

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My assumption is they can’t adjust on the fly because they don’t know which items have a specific time they must be done, like an appointment or meeting, vs a todo item that happened to get a time block associated with it. They also don’t know which items can simply be dropped if time becomes a factor.

I tried Structured and gave up on it almost immediately due to the rigidness. Some people can follow a calendar that closely, but I’m not one of those people.

I put items that must happen at a certain time in my calendar. Everything else is a todo item. If I want to, I could schedule blocks of time on my calendar for working on the todo items. During that block of time, I’d work off the todo list, not the calendar. If the time isn’t important, and the tasks just need to be done in order, then why force an artificial time into the mix? It seems like needless complexity.

I see, so the mix of calendar and todos is more practical than live updates scheduling.

I think too much (self)micromanagement kill your productivity. A reasonable way to satisfy your need would be planning your day and estimated task duration, doing your day trying to keep the order of task at least and tracking it, and at the end of the day doing a post-day recap for the record.

you end up with a predicted vs reality calendar, and will allow you to eventually adjust your predictions/model based on passed realisations. With no realtime stuff that you actually don't really have the need to deal with in realtime I believe.

I like the reflection based planning you mentioned, good point.

NotePlan has a plugin that does that. I'm new to it but it has a very interesting approach to things.

Check out this video (3:25s): https://www.dropbox.com/s/wokcvoc6cwps9bb/noteplan%20daily%2...

nice setup, but require plugins and multiple steps to keep your plan up to date.

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