Preventing bottlenecks due to conflicting/crashing project deadlines

[Mary]

Hi all,

This is my first post and I've tried to find something similar so as
to not start a new thread on an old topic so, if I've missed it,
please feel free to just redirect me.

Here's my question/issue; I often end up with a lot of projects for
which the deadlines are around the same time. When planning each one,
I enter the relevant information, the steps, the lead times and so on,
but then they disappear (more or less) from my view until they start
to get closer to the deadline. Unfortunately, when they are raised to
salience, it can end up being 3 to 5 of them at a time that end up
with nearby "start" and "due" dates. I end up with far more tasks on
my task list than can actually be completed within the waking/work
hours during the weeks prior to those tasks. In the end, I end up
feeling stressed and doing mediocre work just to get tasks done before
the deadline or being more vigilant than I want to be considering I
use relatively complex task management software.

To put it in a more concrete way, let's say I have 4 projects that
each require 90 hours are each entered (and broken down into bite-
sized pieces) at different times into my MLO. As (unfortunate) luck
might have it, they all turn out to be due on the same week. When
entering each, I figure a decent lead time for each (because I've
forgotten, since entering the others, that there will be crashing
deadlines) is, say, 5 weeks for each project. Easily doable if only
one or two projects come due around the same time, but with all four
coming due, I now have 360 hours of work to do in 225 hours of time
(assuming a 45 hour work week).

Some solutions:

-> Constantly checking and rechecking projects, deadlines, due dates,
and estimated time needed to complete them, then reworking your task
details so that they all fit... provided you make no mistakes, miss
nothing, and don't miscalculate.
(It seems to me that this option reduces the stress-reduction one
hopes to get from a to-do system to that of a pen and note-pad that
you have to check again and again just in case an unforeseen crisis is
on the horizon.)

-> Leaving the lead time blank or making it so long that you are sure
not to have tasks that you could be working on obscured, that way you
know that by most deadlines everything will have been done long in
advance.
(Of course, this doesn't allow you to realize that you have extra
time to say "yes" to something else, to take a vacation, to catch up
on other tasks that don't have deadlines but would benefit from being
completed, etc. And it leaves you with the feeling like you're never
caught up and always have to be checking things off that list for fear
crashing deadlines might creep up on you. Sure things will get done
ahead of time, but, again, you end up without that feeling of
organization and spaciousness you hope to get out of a to-do system.)

-> Using a separate gantt-style program in which you put major
projects and recurring tasks and that can show you if you've got more
items coming than can be fit into the allotted time unless you start
one or two of them earlier. (Like SmartPlans, which I have never tried
but seems to let you know how many hours a week you need to do on a
project in order to get it done in the lead time and APPEARS to take
the total hours in your workweek into consideration.) Then you can
come back to MLO and change your lead times and other dates
accordingly.
(This means using two different pieces of software to get your
project management done and can lead to slips and so requires
remaining vigilant. Plus it won't fix the times when it's not 4 large
projects, but 100,000 little tasks that will all crash at once.)

I want to enter my information into my to-do program and have it be
smart enough to warn me if I'm coming up to 90 hours of tasks in a 24
hour period (or, 16 if I intend to sleep) or 75 hours of work during a
35 hour work-week. I've tried to play around with different settings
in MLO in order to make it produce views that would simulate this kind
of thing but haven't really come up with a solution.

So, my question is, how have all of you gotten around this type of
problem (well, those of you who have multiple rigid deadlines that
must be adhered to and risk crashing)? It seems that without this, no
matter how sophisticated the time-management software, it's never
going to take away that "oh my god, is there something I really should
be panicking about?" feeling that results from having a complex list
of projects.

Thanks for any help/advice,
Mary

[Dwight]

Mary,
The situation you are describing is exactly the reason for Gantt
charts.
Perhaps someday MLO will do Gantt charts but it does not seem likely
to happen soon. IN my life I have had times when I needed Gantt charts
- the result would be either declining new opportunities as I know I'm
overcommitted, or else announcing that one of my deadlines would have
to be slipped. This usually happened when I was being responsible for
the work of a few dozen people, when it's just me I found it easier to
track it in my head.

I understand why it's a problem to track your tasks in two different
programs. The issue becomes, do you have any time to work on your
actual tasks or do you spend all your time just managing your task
list. Anyhow, if you went ahead and set your work up as a Gantt chart,
why would you also need MLO?
-Dwight

[Richard Collings]

Ha! Your work life sounds like my work life!

Sadly MLO (and GTD) do not have anything to offer the likes of you and me
(as far as I can see). Both pretty good at helping you to work out what you
should do next (and keeping the short term ToDo list manageable) but pretty
useless at telling you whether you are going to be overloaded in a week's
time (or whenever)

Which is why some of us have been asking for some sort 'calendar/gantt'
chart facility which will help visualise what is upcoming over the next few
days/weeks and better, if possible, to indicate whether you are overloaded
on any particular day/week in the future.

However, although there has been some indication that such a facility may
appear in the future, I think the team are very focussed on building mobile
apps at the moment.

Also there is a significant group of MLO users who are very hostile to this
particular idea (they either don't appear to need to plan beyond the next
few days and/or GTD says it is not necessary therefore nobody could possibly
want such a feature - those that ask are just not doing GTD properly)

So who knows?

So as I really like the features that MLO is really good at (managing the
short term ToDo list), I have started using Toms Planner as a way of
visualising work over the next few weeks/months. Very simple to use, basic
and cheap so the amount of duplicated keying is relatively small).

Incidentally, I had a quick Google for Smartplans (which sounds interesting)
but the only thing that came up was this (which appears to be a mobile app
of some sort)
http://appshopper.com/productivity/smartplans-lite-productivity

Was this what you had in mind?

Richard

Hi all,

Some solutions:

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[Stephen J]

Mary,

I also find this a problem without a visual planning tool. I tend to
have a lot more smaller projects that need to be managed but I have
issues if they are all due around the same time. I tend to monitor
these more in the outline than the to do list and just use my to do
list for the things I have planned to do. In each area of my life I
have broken my outline up into timeframes when I would expect to do
projects and have a sub heading for each:

Scheduled (for items that have to be done on a particualr date)

Current (Those I am working on at the moment)

On the Tee (Those I am ready to start/do. These are the ones I intend
to do this week but they don't go on my list until I put them there.
The start date for these is set to next Monday and when I am ready to
do them, I move them to the current section)

On the Horizon (Those items that I will be ready to do in the near
future - maybe next week or the week after. The start date for these
is set to 4 weeks time)

Over the Horizon (Those items that I will not be doing for a while yet
- maybe a month or so away. The start date is set to 2 months time.)

In my weekly review, I check the items in the two horizon groups and
see which ones I want to move up. I then advance the start date of the
headings for all groups by one week. This keeps my to do list shorter
and more focussed but it does mean that I have to keep an eye on my
outline and spend a bit more time planning.

[pottster]

Hey Richard,

Thought of you when I saw this the other day: -

http://www.taskline.com/default.asp

Don't know if you use Outlook but even if you don't it's an interesting "proof of concept" for you scheduling/calendar people (watch the video all the way through). Is this the sort of thing you want MLO to do?

[David....@gmail.com]

Ken,

Thank you for sharing that. It is an interesting approach that I may check out.

[Mary Renaud]

Hi Richard,

Yes, it is a mobile app (iPhone/iPod/iPad) and I downloaded it yesterday to give it a try as a complimentary tool. It's a good concept but too buggy to use. While I love that it allows you to enter the end date, start date, and total hours for a project and then it gives you a graph with your workload (along with a line that lets you see whether it's above/below the workload you want) so that you can change dates to make everything fit the amount of hours you have available, it crashed many many (many, many) times during use. So many times that I would consider it utterly unusable (I would say an average of less than 30 seconds of use before crashes). I tried the company's fix as listed on their website and this changed nothing. My iPhone is under 2 months old so it's not that my OS is too old.

I will have a look at Tom's Planner as a compliment as well. Thanks

I seem to have come up with a temporary system that works inside of MLO. It took a long time to set up and I'm still tweaking it but I will be glad to share it when I see if it works properly. I'd gladly create and upload a template as well if there's room for that here somewhere.

What I don't understand is why so few pieces of software include a "How much work have you booked for period X" feature. Any of the good ones have you estimate your time per task or per project as well as deadlines and lead times so the data's all there. How is it that SmartPlans claims to be the first to have this type of feature. Unless you have only one project (or very flexible deadlines), it can get very complicated very fast. In fact, when I did create my makeshift system, I realized that I had a week where I had 93 hours of work booked (to fit into a 42.5 hour week). Had I continued using the "today forward" method I would have either missed deadlines or had a VERY bad week! Seeing that allows me to adjust start times and spread the work out so that I wouldn't wind up with that kind of a crunch.

If I can think through a helpful way to phrase a feature request (i.e. try to find what the minimum is that is needed for this so the programmers can get the most bang for their programming-hours buck) I'll do so. It seems like something like this would pull a program, especially as full-featured a program as MLO unquestionably to the front of the pack.

Thanks for the suggestion. I'll check it out this afternoon.
Mary

[Richard Collings]

Thanks for the update on SmartPlans – won’t waste time on that one in the short term.

 

Toms Planner does not provide any mechanism for entering times and calculating day by day or week by week workloads.   It is just a visual planner but I find having a visual plan which I can eyeball to see potential clashes very helpful, particularly if it is very quick to update (which it is).  So not ideal but the best thing I have found so far to complement MLO.

 

It also good because you can put other people’s work on it as well and see the relationship between what you are doing and everybody else.

 

And I would agree with  you with regard to the absence of anything that helps you with the ‘How much work have I got on during period x’ problem.    Microsoft Project does it but it is complicated to use and expensive as it is designed to support very large projects.

 

I think it is partly the GTD mindset that says (as far as I understand) “don’t bother with forward planning it is a waste of time.”.   This works fine for things like household tasks where there are no particular deadlines but is useless for you and I who have clients/customers who expect things done by certain dates and, rightly, are not very happy when you miss those dates.  

 

The view which was expressed recently that it wouldn’t help if you did know whether you could take on an extra piece of work, just doesn’t apply as quite often people will accept a delay in starting a piece of work but find it much more problematic if you fail to deliver by the agreed date (as they have then planned in other activities around your delivery date).  And even if they go elsewhere,  they may come back later whereas,  if you take it on and then don’t deliver you then have a seriously unhappy client (or you find yourself, yet again, working an 80 hour week).

 

So I, for one (and there are clearly many others here),  would welcome something in MLO which helps us see more clearly what is coming up in the next few weeks and the workload implications of that.   Not easy but I think many of the elements are in place.   And as you say,  I think it would fill a significant niche.

 

I would also be interested to hear how you have achieved something in MLO that helps you with this task.  I use a ToDo view that groups ‘Key Tasks’ (which are higher level tasks that I flag)  by Start Date which helps but I just don’t find the visual layout very helpful and there is nothing that sums the time allocated to each task by day or week.

 

Richard

--

[Neal]

On Sun, Jan 23, 2011 at 5:27 AM, Richard Collings <r...@rcollings.co.uk> wrote:

I think it is partly the GTD mindset that says (as far as I understand) “don’t bother with forward planning it is a waste of time.”.  

I don't think anybody has told you to NOT to bother with forward planning.  I think people have told you that MLO is NOT geared toward what you want to do.  Future task planning is about three things:

What you need to do at certain times.
What you would like to do at certain times.
    and
What you actually did at certain times.

I would love a tool that would allow me to overlay my plan on my scheduled items.  I'd love to have a dual view of my planned activities next to my actually work.  It's just that I don't see how MLO in its current implementation can do any of that.

As I said before, MLO is really only setup to deal with a next action item.  In particular recurrences are NOT setup to do forward planning.  There is only one instance of a recurrence/rotation and they are based on due dates (which they shouldn't be btw, they should be based on start times).  For future planning you would need a task for each future days recurrences.  So you would have to rewrite how MLO handles recurrences BEFORE you could even begin to deal with "future planning" features.

This is also true for sub tasks done in order and with tasks that have dependencies.  None of those tasks will show up for a future plan.

So until Andrey rewrites MLO, I don't see how he implements what you are asking for.  And that is NOT me trying to be an Andrey apologists.  I just don't see how you get there from here with the current implementation of MLO

[Richard Collings]

A question and observation...

 

Question: so how do you do your forward planning?

 

Observation:   I agree all the issues you identify are issues which would need to be addressed in some way but those ways include not using the facility.  For example, I have significantly reduced my use of recurring tasks because a) you can’t easily reschedule them and b) as you say,  2^nd and subsequent occurrences don’t appear in the current ToDo view.

 

Alternatively <light bulb moment>,  the new ‘Calendar’ view could treat these artefacts differently.  So the existing behaviours would be retained in the To Do view (keeps existing, Calendar hostile user happy) but in the new Calendar view (which can be ignored by those that don’t want to use it),  things like recurring items would be displayed differently (makes Calendar fans very happy).

 

Looks like I have addressed all the objections of those who don’t want the calendar (just ignore the calendar tab).   J

 

Richard

 

From: mylifeo...@googlegroups.com [mailto:mylifeo...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of Neal
Sent: 23 January 2011 4:41 PM
To: mylifeo...@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: [MLO] Preventing bottlenecks due to conflicting/crashing project deadlines

 

On Sun, Jan 23, 2011 at 5:27 AM, Richard Collings <r...@rcollings.co.uk> wrote:

--

[david....@gmail.com]

My forward planning is accomplished using ancient technology: paper, pen, and thought time.

To be candid, I suspect that time to think is the most important of these; a piece of software will probably never (at least in my lifetime) replace the elegance of the human brain in juggling competing demands.

Sent from my BlackBerry.

---

From: "Richard Collings" <r...@rcollings.co.uk>

Sender: mylifeo...@googlegroups.com

Date: Sun, 23 Jan 2011 21:30:55 -0000

To: <mylifeo...@googlegroups.com>

ReplyTo: mylifeo...@googlegroups.com

Subject: RE: [MLO] Preventing bottlenecks due to conflicting/crashing project deadlines

[Mike T]

On Jan 23, 3:27 am, "Richard Collings" <r...@rcollings.co.uk> wrote:
>
> I think it is partly the GTD mindset that says (as far as I understand)
> "don't bother with forward planning it is a waste of time.".   This works
> fine for things like household tasks where there are no particular deadlines
> but is useless for you and I who have clients/customers who expect things
> done by certain dates and, rightly, are not very happy when you miss those
> dates.  
>

While I wouldn't claim to be a GTD expert, I do think this is a
caricature of the GTD approach. In fact Allen says that one reason
people are so enthused when they first start down the GTD path is that
for perhaps the first time they actually see all the things they have
committed to laid out in front of them. He then goes on to say that
many people never do anything in the GTD system past the capture
phase since this alone can make such a difference in their life. This
seems difficult to reconcile with a claim that GTD rejects forward
planning, but maybe its just me...

And in fact GTD does recommend regular reviews of your immediate
tasks, your projects, your longer goals, as often as you need to do so
to keep on top of them. While MLO may not provide a mechanism for
easily seeing conflicts or overscheduling in the way that Gantt
charts, Microsoft Project, etc. do that is hardly something to lay at
the feet of GTD. MLO is a tool for implementing a GTD approach, it
is not GTD. As has been said, the map is not the territory. For many
people MLO provides sufficient tools to implement a GTD approach, but
for others it may not be enough (or even useful).

[Mike T]

On Jan 23, 6:22 pm, Mike T <kenr...@gmail.com> wrote:
> In fact Allen says that one reason
> people are so enthused when they first start down the GTD path is that
> for perhaps the first time they actually see all the things they have
> committed to laid out in front of them.

To make this clearer, I should add he goes on to say that for many
this is an "aha!" moment when they realize they are stressed and feel
like they're never getting enough done because they have committed to
so much more than can be accomplished. And while it might be laudable
to plan on doing so many things (or handling so many clients), a
realistic appraisal shows they have simply taken on too much and they
need to trim back to what can actually be accomplished.

All of which sounds an awful lot like forward planning, at least to
me.

[Dwight]

I'm not much of a GTD expert. But I believe that there's a misunderstanding or misquote.

I believe that GTD suggests a better way to do forward planning, and that better way is to collect all your tasks and obligations in one place, identify those that have actual timing constraints, identify the context within which each is actionable, assign importance (and urgency?) as well as level of effort and duration, then use all of those factors to pick the most productive thing to work on right now.

That's forward planning, I would think.

What I think GTD discourages is assigning a date "next Monday" to a task just because it's important and I hope it gets done next Monday. Because we all know that something will come up and it will get pushed to Tuesday, and we will end up investing time that could have been used to get things done, on rescheduling the task from Monday to Tuesday then to Wednesday until it finally gets done.
GTD may not be the appropriate methodology if you are managing 20 people on a 10,000 hour project with incentives and penalties.

But MLO can be used with methodologies other than GTD.
-Dwight
Sent via BlackBerry by AT&T

-----Original Message-----
From: Mike T <ken...@gmail.com>
Sender: mylifeo...@googlegroups.com

[Richard Collings]

But the key point is that GTD is trying to help you answer one question:
'what should I work on next'.

It offers no help with the question: 'Can I get all these different pieces
of work done by their various deadlines (and how hard I am going to have to
work to get them done)'

And that is the very important thing for many of us. The first is also
important - which is why I stick with MLO.

And yes, the beauty of MLO is that it can support different ways of working.
My dispute is with those who argue, you don't need this
'calendar/planning/gantt' capability because GTD says you don't need it.

So given that MLO can support multiple ways of working, we would like
extended a bit to support our particular way of working. And whilst I agree
that adding this facility is not going to be easy, I do think it is
possible. I have lots of ideas - drawing in particularly on some of the
forms and techniques used with the Pomodoro Technique - only problem is that
I am flat out designing a different system for one of my clients at the
moment.

[Mary D. Renaud]

I think my idea (in a separate thread) might be a decent fix as a compromise. We'd need to avoid recurring tasks, as you point out (which I had not thought about); but I'd be willing to work around that for a quick report on my workload. 

Sent from my iPhone

--

[Mary D. Renaud]

My band-aid system:

At the bottom of my outline list, I created a task (as a folder) with a long string of dashes to visually separate my deadline-free or soft deadline tasks from the hard deadline tasks/projects. Under that (as siblings) I created projects, each named for an upcoming Monday to Friday date range (e.g. "Jan 24 - Jan 28", "Jan 31 - Feb 4", etc). I created 12 or 13 of them as that suits my needs at the moment.

I then went into my outline and selected my projects and tasks with hard deadlines and slipped them in the weekly folder that corresponds to their deadline. If a deadline is early in the week, say a Monday or Tuesday, I slip it in the week before (again, your needs may vary). I then went through the project (as I moved it, so I didn't forget) and pulled tasks that needed to be done earlier out from their parent project, and placed them in earlier weeks according to their deadlines. (I also added a suffix with the project's name or initials so I would still know where it came from or, for multiple tasks, kept them under a parent task with no information other than the project initials or name.) I made certain each task had duration estimates. If I wasn't yet certain of all the tasks that needed to be done for a specific project, I created placeholder tasks that I will replace with specific tasks as the project gets fleshed out. (So they could be spread out as necessary, which comes later.)

I then created a placeholder for tasks that recur each week. I left their recurring tasks above the dashed line, but created a "recurring items" task (with subtasks so that I can easily adjust if a recurring item, like a weekly committee meeting, gets cancelled, but that's likely unnecessary for many people). I also endured the time estimates were accurate for those. I then copied that group of tasks and pasted one into each week.

Finally, I went to the top level of each week, beginning with the farthest into the future, and, since it's a project with the tasks and projects in that week as children, I could easily see how many hours were booked for that week. I moved tasks to earlier weeks as necessary to even out the workload and leave room for unexpected items. I then moved backwards to the previous week and did the same, and repeated for all weeks. 

There were a few other tweaks (like a "deadline management" context to those tasks in the bottom half of my outline, so that I can easily manipulate 'to do' views) but I think they were relatively specific to my needs so I'll spare you a longer email than I've already created.

Once I had done this, the to do views became useful again because I didn't have that am-I-going-to-hit-a-bottleneck question gnawing at me and actually knew what really needed to be done at any given time. Over the last week, with that distraction/concern/stress removed, I have been much more productive and less distracted. Knowing that things are ~really~ properly planned out has freed me up to do the strangest thing: get the work done. 

I hope you find this useful. Obviously ymmv. 

Sent from my iPhone

[Richard Collings]

I am afraid that my brain is just not up to this sort of planning which is why I need something to help me see the work I have got coming up in the future.   And it is clear that I am not alone in this respect.

[Richard Collings]

But unless I am missing something, GTD has nothing to offer in helping me
see that I am overcommitted next week (or whenever).

Don't get me wrong - I find some of the GTD approach useful in helping me
focus on what I need to do next. But it is a one trick pony. I want
something that does more than this. And as far am concerned, the fact that
GTD doesn't do what I want, doesn't stop me from wanting MLO to help me in
with this problem ('Am I over committed next week') because I think it
something that can be achieved without compromising the existing
capabilities.

-----Original Message-----
From: mylifeo...@googlegroups.com
[mailto:mylifeo...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of Mike T
Sent: 24 January 2011 2:31 AM
To: MyLifeOrganized
Subject: [MLO] Re: Preventing bottlenecks due to conflicting/crashing
project deadlines

--

[Mike T]

Have you actually read the GTD book? Just asking.

GTD as I understand it is a system approach to seeing in one place all
the things you have promised yourself you'd do now or in the future.
Its up to you, not GTD, to estimate how long its going to take to
complete them. Now it might be worthwhile to use a tool like a Gantt
chart or MLO or Microsoft Project to estimate how long the things you
have as active projects are going to take to complete and to look for
places where you've scheduled too much to be finished at one time, but
GTD has done its part if its let you keep track of all your
promises.

[Mary D. Renaud]

Is there any way we could steer this away from the gtd discussion? If GTDers have ideas for using it with tight, competing deadlines, great; I'd be grateful to hear them and see if I can implement them. But I need multiple deadline management (as do many program managers, project managers, and students - who also encounter bottlenecking issues) and I'm really hoping to share ideas and tweaks with people about how to do that rather than go back and fourth on the gtd thing.

Sent from my iPhone

[Neal]

Hello Mary,  We have had this conversation with Richard in the past.  Here is the link:

http://groups.google.com/group/mylifeorganized/browse_thread/thread/1831641b58ec4747/4fb039f575aa3715?lnk=gst&q=unschedule+nschm873#4fb039f575aa3715

As to answer your question, I'll review what I posted at that time.  To forward plan you really shouldn't try to place your actual tasks in a calendar.  You only use a calendar to figure out how much time you actually have available to you.  So the steps are:

Figuring out time needed to complete tasks:

First you use MLO, or GTD, or whatever tool you use to gather all of the work you really need to do.  You then take this work and figure out how many 30 minutes time slices you need to complete all the tasks you have given yourself.

From there you add your interruption percentage.  Basically, what percentage of your time at work gets interrupted by others needing something from you.  You have to add enough additional time slices to cover this loss of time.

Now you know how many time slices you need to complete your tasks.

Figuring out time available:

Now you use a calendar to mark all of your commitments.  Read unschedule for more information on how to do this.  Basically, you place all of your scheduled meetings, your travel time, your lunches, your personal and leisure time, etc.  Once you have this you now know what free time is actually remaining for work.

Then you add up this time in 30 minute time slices.  Well you add up how much of this time you are willing to give to work.  You can read about the pomodoro technique as an example of this phase.  So now you know how many "gross" time slices you have available.

Putting it all together:

Since you now know how man time slices you need and how many time slices you have, you simply add them up.  You go back to your unscheduled calendar and start counting time slices available for each day, until you reach the total slices you determined that you need to complete your tasks.

Advantages:

The advantage of this method over trying to put tasks directly into a calendar is its flexibility.  You don't have to spend any time "sliding" tasks to a later time slot if you add an emergency task.  By having time needed and time available as separate lists you can add or subtract tasks to your list and readjust your dates accordingly.

So to recap, you would use MLO or GTD or your personal task collection methodology.  You then use a calendar and the unschedule technique.  You would then use pomodoro or the dash method for your time segment technique.  Combine them all together and you can now forward plan.

Anyway, I hope that is what you were looking for...

[Mary D. Renaud]

Thanks Neal,

This seems a lot like the system I devised in order to use mlo (with the exception that, since I've turned my weeks into 'projects', mlo does the counting for me). I guess that means I'm on the right track. It's only been about a week but I'm pleased with it as a band-aid solution so far.

Sent from my iPhone

[Richard Collings]

This works fine if the individual tasks don’t have individual deadlines.  But tells me nothing if they do.

 

I agree completely that if you live in a world where you just want to know what you are going to be able to get done in the next month then there is no need to plan on a day by day, week by week or whatever basis but when you have multiple short term deadlines, then unless I am missing something,  it doesn’t help.

 

You have, as Mary is doing (I think), to start allocating tasks to time slots (daily, weekly, or whatever) and then you can do what you have set out with regard to seeing whether everything fits into those slots

 

Again I am happy to agree that this is more work and less flexible than the scheme you set out but quite a lot of us have meetings for which we have to prepare materials,  clients who want work done by certain dates, etc and are prepared to accept this overhead in order to get a better picture of whether we can meet those individual deadlines.

 

I would like to be able to do precisely what you have set out but be able to do it day by day or week by week basis and I would like to be able to do it in MLO.

 

And if it is done in a separate Forward Planning tab (shall we call it that rather than Calendar), it will no effect on those who don’t have deadlines who can continue to just use the ToDo tab to work out what they should be doing next and whether they can get it all done in the next month.

 

Richard

 

 

From: mylifeo...@googlegroups.com [mailto:mylifeo...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of Neal

Sent: 25 January 2011 4:43 PM
To: mylifeo...@googlegroups.com

[Richard C]

What I am trying to say is that GTD goes so far but doesn't go far enough for me. And the fact that GTD doesn't do it, doesn't mean that we are not allowed to ask for MLO to do it   The point is we already have all our tasks in MLO - it would make a lot of sense to provide some simple extensions which allowed some time based forward planning for those of us that need it (which is quite a lot of people).

[Richard C]

And to emphasise the point,  I have the followign situation as we speak

• a meeting tomorrow for which I need to prepare a paper (tomorrow morning)
• a 3 day workshop for which I need to prepare the materials (over the weekend - sigh)
• a meeting on Thursday for which I also need to prepare some materials (probably in the evenings of next week - sigh again)

 

Now if I use the planning approach that Neil proposes and I used as my time horizon, next Friday, I could find that I could get all my preparation tasks done by next Friday.  Whoopee.

 

But to repeat, this tells me nothing.  In fact, the reason it all fits inis  because next Friday I have lots of spare time and I can do all my preparation tasks next Friday long after I actually need to complete them.

 

The only way I can see whether I can meet my deadlines is to plan on  day by day basis.