Automated rescheduling of incomplete tasks

[Florian Haas]

Hi Cameron,

here's something that has irked me for a while. A bit of backstory:

If I set a due date on a task, then it's because I am scheduling that task to be done on a certain date. I have GQueues set up to feed into my Google Calendar, and have configured my GQueues account so that a deleted calendar entry marks the corresponding task complete. That way, I hardly ever use the GQueues web UI, and do most of my work from Gmail and Google Calendar using the GQueues Chrome extension, all of which works beautifully. Every morning, all I need to do is look at my Google Calendar, and I know exactly what I'll be doing, when my fixed appointments are and when I get to do my tasks. GQueues just stays in the background and gets out of my way. 

Now, sometimes things just don't fit, and tasks don't get done. Of course, the task still does need doing, so I end up rescheduling tasks in my calendar. That too works nicely by drag & drop thanks to GQueues' 2-way Google Calendar sync, but:

- it's a manual task that could just as well be automated,

- it's error prone: if I forget to do this, a task drops off my weekly view and may be lost to oblivion.

And now on to my suggestion:

What I would love to have is an optional automated rollover capability: at the end of a day, when a task hasn't been completed, I'd like for it to be rescheduled to the next business day, or perhaps X workdays into the future.

Todoist does this semi-automatically with smart rescheduling. That comes with an additional feature that you might consider: it limits the number of tasks scheduled for a single day to a configurable value (5 by default), so it will actually select the next business day that has fewer than 5 tasks scheduled.

What do you think?

Cheers,

Florian

[J.C.]

This gets to the heart of one of the few shortcomings of Gqueues for me and it is by and large the most frustrating...rescheduling incompleted tasks.  Conversations similar to this have taken place before and one of the responses (user based) I normally see is, "if you're having to regularly reschedule tasks, then you're not planning properly".  That's a great thought if you're working in a highly controllable environment, however, I'm guessing a lot of us don't.  Mine, at times, is anything but controllable as I have yet to obtain the ability to control the weather and equipment malfunctions to name a few. 

Florian's suggestion for auto-reschedule is great.  It would be nice to configure that setting on queue by queue basis.  I'd be good with the daily auto-limiting feature as long as it was optional and configurable.

Which brings me to this:  Florian's suggestion would go hand in hand with batch/bulk editing...the ability to apply the same change across a range of selected tasks within a regular queue, smart queue, or list of search results without having to edit each one individually.  I can't begin tell you how much time, effort, and aggravation this would save me...as would Florian's auto-rescheduling suggestion.  

Cameron, Gqueues is great on the "sterile" front-end part of planning.  However, it really needs some additional features to help the user efficiently manage the messy middle and rear-end part of acting/planning when "life" happens and things need rearranged.  

Thank you Cameron, Florian, to all the users of this fantastic thing called Gqueues!

[Florian Haas]

On Tue, Mar 14, 2017 at 4:07 PM, J.C. <jcsc...@gmail.com> wrote:
> This gets to the heart of one of the few shortcomings of Gqueues for me and
> it is by and large the most frustrating...rescheduling incompleted tasks.
> Conversations similar to this have taken place before and one of the
> responses (user based) I normally see is, "if you're having to regularly
> reschedule tasks, then you're not planning properly".

I'd say that thinking is fundamentally at odds with GTD, which GQueues
claims and aims to be an implementation of. GTD does say that rather
than operating on self-imposed strict deadlines (which people
frequently set completely needlessly, contributing to stress and
frustration), you should pick the tasks you work with based on
context, time, and energy available at that time.

> Which brings me to this: Florian's suggestion would go hand in hand with
> batch/bulk editing...the ability to apply the same change across a range of
> selected tasks within a regular queue, smart queue, or list of search
> results without having to edit each one individually. I can't begin tell
> you how much time, effort, and aggravation this would save me...as would
> Florian's auto-rescheduling suggestion.

Indeed, bulk editing would be a handy feature to have.

Cheers,
Florian

[Cameron (GQueues Team)]

Thanks for the feedback and suggestions!

The (configurable) auto-scheduling sounds like a great idea!  I've added it to the list of feature requests.

And bulk editing is on our roadmap!

Cameron

Cheers,
Florian

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Cameron Henneke

Founder, GQueues

"The leading Google-integrated task management service for people and teams."

[J.C.]

Yay!!!

On Tuesday, March 14, 2017 at 4:39:33 AM UTC-4, Florian Haas wrote: