Feature Request - preview of pre-scheduled tasks in Calendar

[Greg.O]

I'm not sure something similar has not been requested yet but here you
go:

I usually do my weekly planning on Sunday afternoon. Quite often I have
a long list of mini-projects and corresponding tasks for the coming
week that I'd like to distribute over the next 7 days. The problem is,
when assigning due date to tasks I don't really have a clear idea of
how many items have already been scheduled (recurring tasks, tasks
input earlier) for any given day (other than today of course).

For example, I look through my list of things I'd like to do the coming
week, pick up the first one and make it due on Tuesday, I pick up the
next one and schedule it for Thursday. When deciding what day to
schedule my 20th task for I have to guess as I don't have a idea of how
many tasks and time has already been scheduled for any day. I might
remember I've already (during today's planning session) made 5 tasks
due on Friday so I should be ok adding another one but I might not
remember there are any recurring tasks or ones that I scheduled a week,
month or year earlier. This makes plannig quite hard and often
unproductive as often I will often open my MLP in the morning to find
the tasks I scheduled for today (including recurring ones) would take
much more to complete than the 3 hours I'm commited to spend on my
personal projects every day.

What I would find really useful is the ability to preview what has
already been scheduled for any day while looking at the calendar. Say,
I'm deciding on a due date for "2 hours of research for Project X" - I
click on the due date box, calendar drops down and as I hover my mouse
over any day in the future a little balloon tooltip message shows me
all tasks already booked for that day. So straight away I see Wednesday
is already "fully booked" but I only have 5 items on my list for
Monday. Bingo, I schedule my ProjectX-research task for Monday and I no
longer have to worry I might have over-scheduled one or more days and
things may end up being postponed.

If the baloon message could also add up total time required for all
tasks on a given day it would be even more helpful.

Regards,
Greg

[lifeaddict]

If I correctly interpret your request you would like a graphical/visual
display of tasks and appointments scheduled for any given day so you
can quickly assess the expected load for any given day. This has been a
hotly debated topic for some time. There was a thread that ended about
a month ago that had approximately 58 responses on the topic that you
might want to check out.

[metroboy]

Greg,

I have this same need, and I've solved it by syncing MLO with Outlook
2007 beta. Outlook 2007 has a new feature that lets you see tasks for
that day in a list below the times for that day (it only shows tasks
which have either a datrt date or due date on that day).

The extra benefit for me is that I can drag my tasks into the order in
which I want to do them for that day. (This has been an omission that
has really vexed me in MLO -- I often know more about what needs to get
done first than the prioritization algorithm does!) Previously, I used
to set up my tasks this way every morning:
1. tag the items I wanted to get done today with an "@today" context.
(this keeps me from having to remove them from their place in my task
outline)
2. filter the to-do list by "@today" -- now I see just a list of the
tasks I have flagged for today.
3. artificially wiggle the importance and urgency sliders on each task
until they appear in the to-do list in the order I think they should be
done.

This worked OK, except that I often ended up with far too many tasks on
my @today list (each day's over-ambition tends to accumulate as the
tasks keep rolling over to successive days!)

Now I use the following procedure to create a daily to-do list in
Outlook 2007:
1. update my task outline in MLO. Tasks that I want to be done today
are the *only* tasks that I flag with a start date.
2. I sync MLO with Outlook 2007
3. Now I look at my calendar in Outlook 2007, and all my tasks flagged
with a start task of today (or earlier) appear below today's times,
color-coded by contexts. I drag the tasks to the order I like.
4. Here's the cool part -- I can easily postpone the tasks til
tomorrow, "this week", "next week" or any custom date by right-clicking
on the task's flag.

I find that this allows me to more quickly create a reasonably-sized
to-do list for today, and to spread out any extra tasks throughout the
week. (I realize this partly contradicts the GTD dictum to focus on
Next Actions rather than scheduling -- but I need some constraints, as
my Next Action list in each project kept growing and growing, and I do
well with feedback about how much time I really take to accomplish my
tasks.)

A couple of caveats about this procedure:

* you must have all recurrences in Outlook rather than MLO, or the
syncing won't work. (even so, there are weird artifacts showing up in
MLO for the tasks I have that recur every day -- their due date in MLO
now shows up as being sometime in 2017, and it recedes further into the
future each day! Fortunately this doesn't seem to affect Outlook's
functionality)

* I often get Errors or Warnings during the sync process, but almost
all of these appear to be MLO not being able to interpret the
recurrence details from Outlook.

hope this helps --

Nick

[lifeaddict]

Thank you for sharing. This sounds like it might work. I have been
asking for a visual calendar display since I bought the product two
years ago. The second thing I wanted was the ability to turn off the
priority scheme and order things manually. Ideally I would like to do
it in MLO but since I can't I will definitely try the beta of Outlook.

[Greg.O]

Nick,

Thanks a lot for your suggestion and the time you put in to describe
your set-up. I'm downloading Office 12 right now and will soon install
the latest version of Outlook and play with it. Your idea to sync MLO
and Outlook is simple elegant yet effective - I've synced MLO with
Outlook 2003 and can finally see (via the Tasks folder in Outlook) what
my expected workload will be on any given day. That's exactly what I
was after - well, a nice graphical display integrated in MLO would be
better but your workaround does the trick for me :)

Once again thanks for your help.
Greg.O

[metroboy]

Greg,

glad that worked out for you. Outlook 2007 goes one step better than
Outlook 2003 because you can see your tasks that are starting/due each
day directly below that day's calendar.

I'm still getting strange Warnings and errors during sync for recurring
tasks. (I think it happens when Outlook 2007 rolls over each day's
tasks to the next day). However, I'm safely ignoring these warnings
with no obvious effect.

good luck --