How do you guys use MLO?

[Holmes245]

Hey guys, I've been using MLO for the past several years, at least since 2010, I believe. However, I'm at a point where I want to plan out the next week but I find that it's hard to do with MLO. I recently watched a video by Brett McKay from the Art of Manliness called "How to Plan Your Week" which requires one to look at what needs to be done. One of the tools he used as an example is a calendaring tool. The benefit of the calendar is that you can see your week overview. With MLO, I can't do this since one can't see repeating tasks. Is there any setup or ideas that you guys would have for using MLO with something like Google Calendar to plan out one's week and what needs to get done? I wish they implemented together. I have found one web task outliner that does but have had problems with tasks updating in the outliner when I change them in Google calendar. This probably indicates that I may have to move another tool for practical purposes since MLO doesn't have a calendar but wanted to check in with you all for ideas before I did. I may not be using MLO the best way. Perhaps I should only be sticking to projects (tasks with more than one action for me) and try not to use it to keep every thing I need or want to do in it?

Thanks.

Joel

[Holmes245]

I probably should add that the thing I find frustrating about MLO is that I can't see the schedule for repeating tasks easily to plan out my week. I can set recurring tasks, sure, but the problem I have is that I can't easily see if any of them conflict because I don't have a birds-eye view of the whole week, only what tasks are due for the current day. I'm not sure if there is a way to set up MLO easily that would allow me to use it like this. Otherwise, I'm thinking I need something else altogether.

[Dwight]

Hi, Joel.
I don't personally do a weely review or a weekly plan but I know that a lot of people find it essential.  There have been many requests over the years for a calendar interface to MLO. The current version of MLO for iPhone and iPad includes a calendar interface. Since it's already released, I would imagine that it would not take too much hunting to find a description,  screenshots, and maybe even some reviews.

Andrey has committed to deliver an equivalent functionality for Android but he has not yet said when. No word yet   on a windows or web version.
-Dwight
Mlo betazoid on Android sgn2

On Sep 4, 2015, Holmes245 <joel....@gmail.com> wrote:

I probably should add that the thing I find frustrating about MLO is that I can't see the schedule for repeating tasks easily to plan out my week. I can set recurring tasks, sure, but the problem I have is that I can't easily see if any of them conflict because I don't have a birds-eye view of the whole week, only what tasks are due for the current day. I'm not sure if there is a way to set up MLO easily that would allow me to use it like this. Otherwise, I'm thinking I need something else altogether.

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[Jonathan]

Hi Joel,

I use Google Calendar to get an overview of the week's fixed events. I generally don't place tasks from MLO onto the calendar unless I have to, and I find MLO's Date and Goals views sufficient. I have a weekly planning session involving a 2-stage process of situation assessment (i.e. noting important current information which needs to be taken into consideration to meet standards in key areas, based on up-to-date info from various relevant sources and consideration of relevant factors of expected events) and then decision making based on that assessment, from which goals for the week ahead emerge. A mini-version of this situation assessment and planning every morning also, for the day's work, mostly involving checking calendar and due/goal MLO tasks and thinking about the preconditions for goals to be achieved or standards to be met. It can be helpful to keep a detailed Event Log of the day or a period, in which any relevant event or problem is listed with the time. This can be examined afterwards to better understand what went wrong in a day or week and debug, problem solve, and plan better iterations for the following day or week.

Jon.

On Saturday, 5 September 2015 05:40:30 UTC+10, Holmes245 wrote:

Hey guys, I've been using MLO for the past several years, at least since 2010, I believe. However, I'm at a point where I want to plan out the next week but I find that it's hard to do with MLO. I recently watched a video by Brett McKay from the Art of Manliness called "How to Plan Your Week - private" which requires one to look at what needs to be done. One of the tools he used as an example is a calendaring tool. The benefit of the calendar is that you can see your week overview. With MLO, I can't do this since one can't see repeating tasks. Is there any setup or ideas that you guys would have for using MLO with something like Google Calendar to plan out one's week and what needs to get done? I wish they implemented together. I have found one web task outliner that does but have had problems with tasks updating in the outliner when I change them in Google calendar. This probably indicates that I may have to move another tool for practical purposes since MLO doesn't have a calendar but wanted to check in with you all for ideas before I did. I may not be using MLO the best way. Perhaps I should only be sticking to projects (tasks with more than one action for me) and try not to use it to keep every thing I need or want to do in it?

Thanks.

Joel

[Elizabeth Lindsay]

My reply is quite late, but hopefully you might still find it useful.  For me, it would be a disservice to all I have on my plate if I made a weekly plan.  I much prefer to follow Getting Things Done (GTD) and make decisions more on the fly after each completed task.  The closest I come to a weekly plan is that on Friday when I do my review, I star items that need my focus the following week.  Each time I'm ready for a new task, I look at the tab by due date first to see if I have anything critical due that day or soon.  Then I look at the starred tab.  Lastly, I use the context tab.  This way, each time I am deciding what to work on, I'm getting the most bang for my buck.

[John Smith]

I too have been using the David Allen GTD 'on-the-fly' method. But I have to admit that it hasn't been working particularly well for me.

On balance I think the there definitely *IS* some merit in putting certain things into a calendar of some sort - and it needs to be something that lets you generate an nice visual overview of what I've got coming up, as I find that helps me generate energy(!)

To be fair to GTD, without any doubt I am not executing GTD very correctly. Nonethlesspersonally I find with GTD that it's far too easy to get sucked into details. And although I have started getting into MLO's Goals more  (which definitely helps) I would definitely appreciate much better calendaring functionality.

Personally I still use Outlook (2013) with MS Exchange which after many years of use I am now used to. But I find it to be a pretty hateful application.  Although it's great to sync emails across all my devices... what I dislike about Outlook is:

a) Use of colours is extremely primitive - limited range; limited syncing; hard to see visually what day it it. Even seeing which row you have selected is stupidly hard.

b) After *several* hours of research over a number of years it turns out that if you have a high resolution screen and have therefore increased the Windows 'DPI' in order to make text legible, then Outlook deliberately blurs any inserted into the email. Unthinkably, it actually blurs the original image! Even more unthinkably, there is absolutely nothing you can do to stop Outlook behaving like this. [groan]   Microsoft have had this problem for over a decade and apparently are not going to fix it any time soon.

c) Fwiw, the big problem with using Exchange for email is that there is a very limited range of mobile phone email apps that work with it.

J

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[Alan Grainger]

Hi J,

If you're using Android, try the Nine email client. It's a game-changer.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.ninefolders.hd3&hl=en

Alan

[John . Smith]

YES - I am already using Nine as an emails client. And having tried about 10 different apps before I found it (a painful journey!) I can report that it is extremely good as an Exchange client.  :^)

However me thinks it doesn't do calendar... right?

The main calendar app I'm using is Business Calendar (v1.4.9.2), however I don't think it syncs the colour of diary entries.

J

[Wallace Gilbraith]

Deja office syncs calendars with outlook, including category colours

Wol

- sent from my phone - please excuse brevity -

- phone sends from gmail account, but please always mail me at ho...@gilbraith.co.uk -

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From: "John . Smith" <shi...@gmail.com>
Sent: 20 October 2015 20:15:02 BST
To: MyLifeOrganized <mylifeo...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: [MLO] Re: How do you guys use MLO?

[Alan Grainger]

It syncs the calendar just fine, not sure if it has one built in.

I use DigiCal and it works perfectly for me. I tried Business Calendar, but wasn't a fan. I run solely out of a week view, and IMO DigiCal is the best for that.

The widgets are also great.

[John . Smith]

As a fan of Weekly views I'm trying out DigiCal. However I can't work out how to sync colors with Outlook which is crucial to me. Can Digical do such a thing?

J

[John . Smith]

Deja office seems to require Companion Link to be installed on my PC in order to sync colors. I guess the Outlook API doesn't include colour (why am I not surprised?) so this makes sense.  
Companion Link seems expensive at $49.95...

J

[J Smith]

UPDATE
1. I couldnt get Digical to synchronise appointment colours (via Categories).
2. So I am trying Deja Office. Off to a TERRIBLE start though as DejaCalendar via Companion Link has managed to erase all the existing Categories on all my existing appointments on Outlook!

Deja is a leviathan of an application - i.e. it is extremely ambitious in its scope (hence the high price). All I want to do is sync colours on my Appointments!
Deja seems pretty clunky, with everything looking pretty oldfashioned and lots of the defaults being horrible. It also got a fair number of terrible reviews (for sync failures etc) on Amazon but I couldn't find an alternative app in the time available so I have gone with it for now.

And finally I do now have appointment colours going from PC to Android and back. Phew! 

J