time we spent on tasks + daily/weekly/monthly/annual reports.
Andrei
Feature request: ability to track the time we spent on tasks + create weekly/monthly/annual reports.
My use case, is to track only the time for the Parent groups (main life directions/needs):
Example of an MLO tree:
- Kids
----- tasks - Communication
----- tasks - Work
----- tasks - Parents
----- tasks - Help others
----- tasks
For example, i would like to spent 1 hour for playing with my Kids, 20 minutes of Communication with people, 4-6 hours for high productive Work, 20 minutes speaking/doing something for my Parents and so on. I don't plan to track the time i spent on subtasks (child of Work/Parents and so on).
Then, to the end of the day, i would like to check how many hours i spent on this PARENT tasks (time i spent on main Life directions).
The Weekly/monthly/annual reports will give an overview of the life flow.
Does anyone think this feature will be good for integration into the MLO?
Thank you
BR
Andrew
m...@grantsmiths.org
Hi: Andrei.
I am afraid of this request because it sounds like a small and simple thing but when you break it down into what would have to be developed there is potentially a huge amount of work involved.
How would MLO know how long you spent on each task? At the end of a task that took a minute and a half, would you spend an additional half minute clicking entering 00:01:30 into a “time spent” field? Or would you look for “start task” and “end task” buttons and ask MLO to calculate the interval between them? What if you take a minute out for an unrelated phone call – would there have to be “pause” and “resume” buttons? What if you forget to click “start” and notice afterwards – will you need to go in and enter a start time and end time? Will MLO need to remember what time you started and ended the task, so you can calculate if you spent enough parenting time in the evenings and weekends? You will need a report that shows total time spent by group, right? For you, it looks like the totals would be based on “top level parent” but I’ll bet other people would want it by category, or goal, or flag, or starred. Are totals enough or do you need subtotals? Do you want to enter your planed target for each group and get a report showing variance? Will you need pie charts? I’ll bet you would like a radar chart (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radar_chart) so you could see the variance.
An additional risk is that this will open the door to a raft of other, related requests. If you know the anticipated effort per task and you have a budget of how much effort you plan of each type (or group) then people will want to know whether they have enough time to finish the planned tasks of each type by their due dates, in other words are you overcommitted. If they are overcommitted they will want to know when they will really be able to finish each task so they can make promises with confidence. They will want to put a cost per hour for different types of effort and use it to make estimates (passed on planned effort) and invoices (based on actual effort).
Microsoft project and other industrial strength project management tools do a superb job of all of this. Each one of them requires a huge purchase price, a powerful computer to run on, and a skilled administrator. I don’t want to see MLO end up like that. In order to avoid going there by creeping bloat, you need to draw a firm and solid line and then not cross it. Tracking actual effort is on the wrong side of that line for me.
Maybe I have the line in the wrong place. Maybe your request is really simple and easy. I would love to see you thing it through further, and describe it, not in terms of what it would let you do, but specifically what would have to change in MLO to make it happen. I would also like to hear whether you agree that there should be a boundary that MLO refuses to cross to prevent it from going industrial-strength and leaving the current users behind, and if so, where would you put that line?
-Dwight
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Richard Collings
I am short of time at the moment so don’t have time to post a detailed response but I would definitely vote for something like this. I use an approach based on the Pomodoro technique which plans and records time spent in half hour units and think it should be possible to come up with something relatively simple that would not intrude for those that are not interested, which is flexible so that it supports a range of different time recording requirements and which could be used for both recording time spent but also, more importantly, helps with forward planning too (ie it would be incorporated into the diary/planning tool).
Richard
Darko Bazulj
gadgety
BOC
-----------------------
We have just released version 3.6.x with full UNICODE support and
important improvements inside the core. Now we are ready to move to
the new version 4.0 with improved UI and new features.
Here is the part of what we plan to add:
- Time tracking in some way
Richard Collings
Hi BOC. There should be a name for this condition: thinking that you can get 3-4 times the amount of work done in a day than you can actually do. I am nearing 60 (arrgh – I think that is the first time I have written that) and suffer still suffer from this chronic overoptimism. It is what we call (in the UK only) a ‘double whammy’ because not only do you not get the work done but you also end up beating yourself up over not having got it done.
That’s my I like the ideas in the Pomodoro technique (which I don’t properly apply) where you establish (on average) the number of Pomodoros (half hour focussed sessions) that you can get done in a day (by monitoring what you do get done) and estimate the number of Pomodoro’s in each of your tasks; and then use these two bits of information to establish what you are likely to get done in a day. And which is why I would like to see something that allows us to a) record an estimated time against a task; and b) see the total time allocated to all tasks that you have allocated to a particular day in some sort of ‘calendar’ view.
Richard
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Lisa Stroyan
That’s my I like the ideas in the Pomodoro technique (which I don’t properly apply) where you establish (on average) the number of Pomodoros (half hour focussed sessions) that you can get done in a day (by monitoring what you do get done) and estimate the number of Pomodoro’s in each of your tasks; and then use these two bits of information to establish what you are likely to get done in a day.
Richard Collings
J
I know but my current state is one of continual self flagellation (in the mental sense only!) for not having got as much done in a day as I anticipated. (Aside: although I would recommend Mindfulness here as being something that makes the pain less – definitely worth Googling)
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m...@grantsmiths.org
I understand the need to predict what will get done and what will not, in a constrained time period, when there are commitments being made to bosses or clients. Otherwise I would rather use the tools of MLO to get the right stuff, and as much of it as possible, done in the time I have. I don’t think you can achieve that if you are pouring energy into knowing in advance when each task will finish and which tasks will remain unaddressed.
-Dwight
From: mylifeo...@googlegroups.com [mailto:mylifeo...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of Lisa Stroyan
Sent: Monday, December 17, 2012 12:32 PM
To: Groups, Email
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Mark Levison
To get a rough idea try looking at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planning_fallacy which does a good job of explaining the problem in layman's terms.
Want to better job of predicting the future:
- focus on slicing all tasks to roughly equal size +/- 50% will do
- ensure no task is larger than a half day
- count the number of tasks you achieve daily
- use a trailing average over the past week (or similar time span) as a rough predictor of the number of tasks you will achieve today.
Learn to do this well and you will spend less time guesstimating and more time executing.
FYI Yes this adapted from what I do with teams, on a larger scale.
Cheers
Mark
Cheers
Mark Levison
Agile Pain Relief Consulting | Writing
Proud Sponsor of Agile Tour Gatineau Ottawa Nov 28, Toronto 26 and Montreal 24
Richard C
Lisa Stroyan, mailto: ...@gmail.com
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Andrei
I reply so late, because, in the meantime i tested TDL application which has a calendar and also a task tracking time feature.
I migrated some projects to TDL and worked with them during about 3 weeks.
I am back to MLO now, and, frankly, i don't miss the calendar from TDL, but i miss very much the task tracking feature.
Here is the link to the application:
http://www.codeproject.com/Articles/5371/ToDoList-6-6-b1-Beta-Release-An-effective-and-flex
I ask the folks to test the timer feature of ToDoList and report here the suggestions for the implentation into the MLO.
My english is bad, and it takes a lot of time to write some simple text, that's why i ask somebody else to write that.
Some comments about tracking in TDL:
In TDL, Every task has a button. When we press that button, a timer starts counting the time in the background (we don't see a clock image or something else). Once we press again that button the timer stops and the counted value will be added to the task. Also, all the Parrent tasks are updating their time based on the newly added data from their subtask.
Why i think it is important?
Last week i worked hard to build a website. When i finished the first step of building, i thought that i worked at least 4 days to do it.
However, when i looked at the counted time, i saw that i worked continuously only 18 hours. So, here i observed that i count incorrectly the time which i spent to do the tasks. And, i guess, many people is doing the same error as me, daily.
Lisa Stroyan
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Andrey Tkachuk (MLO)
A.
