Your advice on using MLO without calendar and reference material capabilities.

[Tomer]

Hey community!
I'm not gonna write a lot about how lovely MLO is cause we all know it, that's why we are here.
However, among the many many questions and requests I have for the MLO team (sent them already) there are a couple which are so important and fundamental to how I work and live, that I can't just wait for them to be supported (looking back at the forums, some requests are at least 5 years old!) so I thought I'll ask the more experienced MLO users fo advice, as I'd really love to find a way to continue and use MLO as my primary tool (just love the flexibility and speed of the outline system so much):

1) How do you deal with not having calendar in MLO? How do you see what's planned out for your day/week? Having "my life organised" is not only about organising, but also seeing it all clearly (that's the whole reason why we want to organise our lives).
MLO doesn't have a weekly/monthly calendar view, nor a feed we can add to gCal/iCal (like toodledo, RTM, Nozbe, and nearly every popular task management app on the planet).
(I don't have outlook (costs £100!) but wouldn't mind installing Thunderbird / WindowsLiveMail / alternative, if someone has experience with integrating them with MLO and satisfied with the result)

2) How do you deal with not having a function to collect reference material in MLO? How do you work on projects and actions without being able to collect articles from the web, photos, files, emails, which are all relating to the project you are planning in MLO?

Having "my life organised" means having everything under control, all the elements. Not spread across many places - that's the definition of a mess essentially.
We all  have ideas for how they can do it: * using their MLO servers (since we pay for cloud sync already) * integration with evernote / dropbox / Drive.
But at present - what is your current system/method?

Thanks!
Looking forward for great ideas from great minds! (and hoping that Andrey Tkachuk see that as well).

[Stephen Jones]

Tomer,

Couple of comments. I would love the calendar integration but have learned to live without it over the years. I use outlook as my everyday calendar, and I tend to have both open on my desktop. At my weekly PReview I will put items on the calendar if they need to be. However, that doesn't happen that often. Generally, my appointments are in outlook and my tasks are in MLO.

With regard to resources,  I use Evernote for everything, with a notebook for current projects. If I want a link to a particular resource in MLO, I just copy the Evernote note link and paste it into the notes section of the task in MLO.  If there are a lot of resources, I will tend to use a table of contents in Evernote and I still just need the one link in MLO.

[Dwight Arthur]

Hi, Tomer. You mention iCal - are you using an iPac or iPhone, maybe? There seems to be a calendar interface available for these devices, there a video here: https://youtu.be/kS_4GAhJxik

Supposedly an equivalent feature is under development for Android as well. But if you are windows-only you may not have access to this device. Maybe you should consider getting MLO for your phone if you don't have it already . . .

Regarding resources, I have done a few different things. Like many others, I have collected notes in Evernote; on Android it's only a couple of taps to share an Evernote to MLO, you end up with an MLO task whose note is a link to the URL representing the Evernote. Similarly, for one project I collected a folder in my Gdrive containing a bunch of pdf's and a spreadsheet, then shared the folder to mlo and ended up with a task whose note contained a url that connects to the gDrive folder. I've recently discovered Google Photo which gives me something I've long wanted: the ability to quickly snap a photo and create a task that presents the photo whether accessed on Windows or Android. Just snap the pic, load the Photo's app, select the photo and share to MLO. The app backs the photo up to a website and creates an MLO task with the url of the photo. Note each of these shares leaves your information pretty significantly exposed on the net, and would not be appropriate for sensitive information.

[Stéph]

Good topic, Tomer, and some useful replies already.

 

From my point of view:

1) On my desktop - I flick between my Outlook calendar (which has a non-editable view of my personal Google calendar) and MLO windows, or place the two windows side-by-side.  When doing that, I have a view set up to display tasks in due date order, grouped by date. You can always sync tasks to Outlook but I've never tried it, firstly because you have to edit the Registry to get that feature back in Outlook 2010 and above, secondly because it sounds like a recipe for complication.

On my iPhone or iPad - As Dwight said, we get an events view which shows tasks and calendar events for the selected day, along with a timeline/graph showing the number of events on each day.  That's very useful for spotting days with potential overload, so I can reschedule tasks.  It's coming to Android users.

 

2) I do collate some reference information in MLO (which is why the file is too sensitive to host on the MLO web server and sync over the Internet).  I copy and paste text notes into folder items under each project. I also copy in links to documents on my hard drive or on the Internet <encasing the file path in angle brackets so even a link with spaces is recognised>.  This works well for me - To answer most questions, I just have to flick open the project on MLO on my phone.

I can see there's a benefit to using Evernote, with all it's formatting and clipping options.  I'm looking into setting up OneNote notebooks for work projects and then linking into them.  I haven't worked out how to do that yet, but it's not a major issue for my productivity and access to my documents.

I'm probably not very representative of users, though - I'm in the minority when it comes to wanting to keep MLO light and easily sync-able between devices, rather than introducing RTF into my notes.  I'm happy to use formatting codes in my text such as _____________ to separate sections of a note, then *bold* and _underline_ for titles or keywords.  I use various hashtag codes too.

 

Stéphane

[Steve Kunkel]

I guess I'm sort'a glad that MLO doesn't try to do a calendar.  My calendar is Pimlical (from the GorillaHaven guy that did the old DateBk5 app for Palm).  It has an incredibly rich feature set (including letting me use my old DateBk5 icon set, LOL).  Annoyingly though, Pimlical is a Java app so it doesn't integrate well with other Windows apps.  If MLO was able to read/write the calendar database, then that would be awesome!  That wouldn't be that same as MLO having a "calendar view" though.  If MLO did have a calendar view, I'd be tempted to use it, then I'd miss out on the Pimlical features I like.  Or I'd just not use the MLO calendar -- that would make me bummed that I'm not utilizing MLO to it's maximum potential.  Or, even worse, I'd try to run both calendars.  Then I'd have two different calendars -- A Dave Alan no-no.  

Having said all that; I do have to admin that some integration with Outlook and/or Google Calendars would probably be a smart feature for Andrey and the MLO crew to add.  My own take on this, is that the way to go, would be to have the MLO flat lists and hierarchies (like it already does), but it would read the OL/gCal databases and embed the calendar items in with the other items.  If the item is altered in MLO, then the changes MUST show up in OL/gCal.  And vise-versa, of course.