Can "end of day" as midnight be changed?

[Venessa G]

I'm on the trial and have found that MLO seems to work really well with the way I think and go about my day, with just a few exceptions. Most I either learned to work within or I work around. But I'm really hoping this one can be changed, rather than endured.

I often work very late, sometimes after midnight. It's disconcerting when I've got my list down to a couple things and then suddenly it's populated with all the tasks for the next morning. Aside from going in and changing all the time settings for the contexts so that there is nothing between midnight and, say 6am (which could then mess up what I *am* working on in the moment), is there any way to have the day reset at a time not midnight?

Thanks!

[r...@rcollings.co.uk]

As another nocturnal worker, I would vote for this

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[Dwight]

Hi, Vanessa and Richard, apologies for the long answer but this is actually a complex subject. MLO has incredible power but a lot of that power is concentrated in the "advanced filter" section, where you can define a set of rules that produced a list of selected tasks that exactly matches what you need to see right now. So, no, you cannot change what time midnight happens but you can create a task list which excludes today's tasks until 6am by setting up the appropriate filters.

First, I want to check a couple of assumptions. I assume that a task that was on your list yesterday and didn't get completed should still be on the list today. Same for tasks that were on the list the day before yesterday and didn't get completed. And so on. Also, from midnight to six, while you are not wanting to see the new day's tasks (yet), I am assuming that if there's a task explicitly coded to start at 3am you want it to show up on your list at 3am and not wait till 6am with the rest of the day's tasks. If either of these assumptions is wrong then my solution won'e work. Please let me know!

So, the key to working with advanced filters is to forget about issues like what time it is and how tired you are and just describe what tasks you want to see. State it in terms like I want to see every task where_____, and fill in the blank with a list of conditions. Usually the conditions describe characteristics of each task that determine if it should be displayed. Sometimes it includes characteristice of the tasks's parent or the task's top-level parent. It does not include the time, the date, the day of the week, or your horoscope. The advanced filter knows about concepts like now(current date and time), today (current date at midnight) and tomorrow (current date plus one at midnight.), but they have to be used in testing against defined characteristics of the task.

We should also do some background on date/time formats and midnight. A date/time value is expressed as a floating-point decimal number, where the whole number part is the number of days since the start of the calendar scheme, and the fractional part is the time. 0.5 is noon (half way through the day) 0.25 is 6am (a quarter of the way through the day) and 0.0007 is one minute past midnight. Also, with floating point numbers you never want to test for equality: 0.500000000000 and 0.499999999999 are different by only one tenth of a microsecond but they are NOT equal. So you should never test for a time = noon, better to test for a time later than 11:59 and before 12:01.

Enough background, let's design a filter.  We need to come up with a set of rules which produce the correct result both before and after midnight and before and after 6am. 

The first challenge is that we want to hide today's new tasks for the first six hours of the day. So the first part of our filter is, do not show a task until it is six hours old, or StartDateTime is before now-(6/24). A minute after midnight, the day's tasks are only one minute old, not old enough, so they are hidden. Six hours later they become old enough and they appear.

This filter by itself would delay every task's appearance for six hours, so if a task starts 4am it would not appear until 10am, six hours later. We only want this six hour delay for tasks that start at midnight, so we need an additional filter to say that if the start time has already passed and the start time is after 12:01 then show the task. Or, StartDateTime is after today 00:01 and StartDateTime is before now.

One more part of the filter: with what we have so far, if a task starts 10pm, the next day from midnight to 04:00 it will be hidden, because it is not after midnight and it is not six hours old. We need another filter to say that tasks from yesterday and earlier are also shown. The filter is StartDateTime is before today.

The final filter is ((StartDateTime before NOW-4H) OR ((StartDateTime after TODAY 00:01) AND (StartDateTime before NOW)) OR (StartDateTime before Today))

If you have already learned how to add a filter to an existing view, then you have everything you need, good luck, and please let us know how it works out. If you don't know how to manage advanced filters, no [problem, just write back and tell us what the view name is of the view you are looking at when, at midnight, the next day's tasks put in their unwelcome midnight appearance. I will write back with simple step-by-step instructions.

-Dwight

 

[Nick Clark]

My suggestion is to have a “Due Tasks” view that grouped by due date. That way the “new” tasks would appear in a Today group while the “current day” tasks would appear as Yesterday. Then just collapse the Today group. This would also enable you to see what’s coming up after you’ve slept!

Nick

[Venessa G]

Thanks Nick! I have set up a tab for that very thing too! I've found it helps as well. Great minds think alike :)

Best,

Venessa

[Venessa G]

Wow, Dwight, thanks so much for the detailed reply! I am going to have to come back when my mind is a bit more fresh and play around with it!  I haven't done anything with advanced filters as yet. I have had MLO for a week now and it took several days for me to get my head around how the basic components work (particularly Contexts; I ended up having to go back in and change Contexts on tasks because I didn't initially understand how they worked). 

I'll be honest and say that the time seems confusing, but it's also almost 2am, so I'm not exactly at the top of my game! lol I will come back and re-read though.

Ultimately, what I've done at this point, is change some of the hours of the Contexts (particularly the Weekly ones) to not display from midnight to 6am. That's helped a lot. I do also admit that when the due date turns red, it makes me anxious... So that's also a big reason why being able to change the chron time from midnight to something later would be useful.

Okay, heading to bed, but I wanted to take a second to thank you very much for such a helpful post and I promise I will come back to it when I can grok it better :)

Venessa

[Wallace Gilbraith]

What happens if you reset your system clock?

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- always mail me at ho...@gilbraith.co.uk -

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[Venessa G]

I imagine it would run chron at midnight however I changed the time on my system clock. But I don't want to do that, both because I use my clock and because I have other things where the chron is set for 3am and changing the system clock would mess *those* up (as well as Google calendar). ;) So that's not a solution I'd use.

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