Events versus tasks - what’s best use of MLO

[Nigel Peters]

Hi all

Apologies for length of this question- you probably don’t need the context to give best advice, but I felt need to spell out...

How best to combine tasks & events in MLO to stay on top of my highly fluid job?

I’m a real estate agent, so therefore “mobile” a large amount of the time and constantly having to accomodate appointment requests that I must input to my iPhone calendar immediately so I don’t potentially end up double-booked or missing an appointment. So those are periods in my week when I cannot be working on “tasks”. The appointment itself often triggers me to create a task to prepare something for it too. I try to keep to an “ideal week” with blocked out times to ring fence certain core activities, but even those can be put under pressure if a crisis erupts.

Incidentally I rely on the iPhone calendar for appointment entries as it seems best compromise for dealing with head office meeting invites that come through my Outlook MS Exchange account, and Google Calendar which my family (and sometimes clients) use for their appointments and which I need to see at same time when scheduling my own “after hours” meeting requests. I don’t have a simple 5 day 9-5 work week,

So here’s my question...

Unless it’s an incidental task that doesn’t require any prep and is no more than around 10 minutes (eg check car tyre pressures), or something to do while doing something else that is a distinct time commitment (eg task to buy birthday card while doing 1hr long grocery shop), how do people record and schedule in a task that requires significant time, but which isn’t an appointment? 

How to use MLO to block out time for tasks, which time  period however does not appear as an event in my iPhone calendar? I’m trying to avoid having to check both MLO tasks coming up for the amount of time I need to do the tasks each time I insert another meeting appointment in iPhone calendar. 

Phew - thanks for anyone who read through to the end of this and has pearls of wisdom to cut through my muddled thinking and/or inadequate use of MLO!!

[Dwight Arthur]

First. let me say that I love MLO, I believe that it is the best and most powerful task manager ever. But Nigel, I don't think you need a task manager. I think you need a project manager.

Project managers allow you to do things like estimating how many hours each task will take, how many hours you plan to work each day, and it will then lay out a schedule of what tasks you will do each day and when the project will be completed. Or, you can pin tasks to a specific day and it will tell you when you have over-committed for the day. Lots of great project managers are on the market, most of them cost a hefty monthly fee and take a lot of time to manage and keep updated. The gold standard is Microsoft Project which starts at $7/month and requires lots of setup and support. A popular alternative is Basecamp. There are many others. I think this is what you need.

There have been repeated requests from MLO users to expand MLO to become a project manager. I think that would be a bad idea. It would be a lot of expensive coding, and the market for product manager is already flooded with mature products.

-Dwight

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[Stéph]

I agree with Dwight, although I'd add that I've tried resource scheduling in Microsoft Project and it failed miserably - It didn't seem to manage to calculate for all the time and resource constraints I put in.

Personally, I use my calendar to schedule all my time and MLO to list tasks. In my calendar, I'll have appointments, but I'll also block out time for big tasks or for contexts for doing tasks. For example, I might block out half a morning for errands and then I'll look at all my MLO tasks with the context @errand to see which I can get done, or I might block out an afternoon to progress a particular project and I'll zoom into that project in my outline to see what tasks need to be done.

MLO on my phone has a  Today view, so I can look at my load of tasks and appointments to make a judgement on whether I'm overloading myself. However, it does only give you a count of events and tasks, it doesn't add up the time scheduled for them all, so you have to use your own judgement to work out whether you're overloading yourself on a particular day.

[westpo...@yahoo.com]

Helo Nigel.

 

Right away I’ll tell you this isn’t an answer, let alone a perfect one.

 

Here’s what I’d investigate:

1. I’d create a project task called “Schedule”
2. Under it, I’d create 9 or 10 sub-tasks, as many hours as you work in a day (haha realtors work all day!).  Each subtasks is labeled “9:00 See: <name>” “10:00 See: <name>”
3. I’d create a dependency between the sub-tasks with an hour delay between each, representing hour-long appointments
4. I’d set the master project task to recurring daily, hours 9:00-17:00 (or your workday)
5. As appointments came into your phone, I’d add a person’s  name to each sub-task.

 

In Use:

1. I call I want an appointment
2. You look at the sub-tasks, find an empty one, and say “I can give you the 12:00 slot”. 
3. Then you change “12:00 See:<name>” to “12:00 See: Michael Emerald”
4. Your active tasks list shows “12:00 See Michael Emerald” You click it off.  Then it shows, an hour later “13:00 See Donald Trump win Presidency”

 

It would need tweaking, but that’s how I’d go about it initially.

 

Alternatively:

                Though I never use it, the Today view gives both your appointments and tasks.  My issue is that the todo list there isn’t as powerful as the views.

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