[HN Gopher] Show HN: A better way to timeblock your day
___________________________________________________________________
Show HN: A better way to timeblock your day
Author : mattcrail
Score : 64 points
Date : 2022-01-19 16:54 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (taskablehq.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (taskablehq.com)
| rememberlenny wrote:
| Very neat primitive. Congrats on getting it out!
| mattcrail wrote:
| Thanks! We are excited to have it out in the world, and I've
| really loved using it myself. I never did
| timeblocking/timeboxing effectively before, but it really has
| changed how productive and focused I am each day.
| irrational wrote:
| > that way no one can schedule a meeting in your focus time.
|
| LOL. Oh my sweet summer child. I so wish I lived in your fantasy
| land where this was remotely true. My experience has been that
| everyone assumes their stuff is more important than your stuff,
| so you will reschedule your stuff to make way for their stuff.
| I've worked in a number of places professionally for 25 years and
| I've never seen different.
| mattcrail wrote:
| We generally mean with things like calendly, but this tends to
| work in smaller teams I've worked in. Not 100 percent of the
| time of course.
| [deleted]
| nefitty wrote:
| I haven't used this app. I had to make my own similar tool.
|
| Anyways, timeblocking changed my life. It was a slog at first. I
| started off by logging what I actually did.
|
| "Sit on couch - 12:15 - 4:30" "Walk dog - 4:30 - 4:45" "Sit on
| couch - 4:45 - 7:00"
|
| Seeing the patterns I had fallen into was like looking into some
| sort of chronographic mirror. My fourth dimensional beer belly
| had gotten pretty big.
|
| Put my ballot in the "What gets measured gets managed" box.
| mattcrail wrote:
| Absolutely - it's really interesting to reflect on where your
| time has gone
| kirubakaran wrote:
| Related free tool (mine) : https://crushentropy.com/
|
| It's like markdown for planning your day.
| [deleted]
| joshka wrote:
| Looks neat. Some alternatives in a similar space (tasks -> time
| blocking)
|
| - Noteplan 3 - https://noteplan.co/
|
| - DayCaptain - https://daycaptain.com/
| mlejva wrote:
| What has worked for you to make timeblocking actually effective?
| mattcrail wrote:
| For me it was about making it simple and always present. Before
| I would have to copy and paste things into Google calendar from
| my project management tool or task manager, and then I would
| constantly be switching back and forth between the two tools.
|
| Now, all my tasks from my project managers are in Taskable, as
| is my calendar. I don't have to switch between the two, and I
| can do all my daily planning in one place.
|
| So now that its quick and easy to do the
| timeblocking/timeboxing, I find myself staying on top of it
| more, and also readjusting how I spend my time throughout the
| day.
|
| I wrote a blog post on my new productivity routine with
| timeblocking if helpful:
| https://taskablehq.com/blog/productivity-system-2021
| krono wrote:
| Time Blocking is a terrible name for the concept. Of the two ways
| you could interpret it, one makes you feel like Kronos the Lord
| of Time, and the other will make you hate your calendar/agenda
| and everything you put on there.
|
| What does not work: Blocking time. The world will not adapt to
| how you planned it last Sunday, and no amount of wanting, asking,
| or even demanding will make it so. Time is fluid, people are
| selfish, your dog is colourblind and can't read.
|
| What can work: Blocks of time. An estimation of how the day will
| go but probably won't. A suggestion to yourself. It is wrong from
| the outset, but still good enough for you to estimate what tasks
| could be taken on, maybe discover some efficiency opportunities,
| and it indicates visually that yes, that thing is due in two
| days.
| ergonaught wrote:
| I've used time blocking for years, and it's worked precisely to
| the extent that I actually used it, and the world assuredly
| adapted. I wasn't suffering from a delusion that I could
| control how every minute of every day was utilized, however.
| mattcrail wrote:
| I would have agreed with you a couple months ago, and we didn't
| ever plan to build this feature. But a lot of users requested
| it, and I started doing it myself, and it does actually work
| really well for me to timebox specific tasks rather than
| timeblock chunks of my day. I never followed the latter when I
| tried it, but when I have timeboxed specific tasks in my
| calendar it works for me and for a lot of our users as well.
| [deleted]
| davidw wrote:
| I get anxious when I have some kind of ... time thing coming up.
| Meeting, have to go get a kid from school... it just sits there
| churning up cycles in my brain.
|
| It's the enemy of "flow".
| mattcrail wrote:
| It's definitely not for everyone. I actually get motivation
| from having the deadline coming up to buckle down and try to
| finish the thing I am doing in the time allotted. So for me it
| helps with flow, but I understand that isn't universal for.
| davidw wrote:
| A deadline like "Friday" can have that effect, but not
| something like "10:25".
| haney wrote:
| I've been using reclaim.ai for time blocking and really liking
| it. One additional feature reclaim.ai has is "smart" 1:1s which
| help me to schedule recurring meetings with my team (which is
| super helpful with our WFH global team).
|
| There seem to be several calendar management apps competing in
| this space right now, excited to see more productivity features
| being built from the competition.
| smhenderson wrote:
| Looks like it could be helpful but after spending over two
| minutes looking for pricing and not finding it I'll never know.
|
| I refuse to even try a product that won't be upfront about
| pricing. Don't 1) tell me I can get two months free, 2) offer to
| let me take a test drive or 3) ask for my email address before
| you've given me a chance to review your standard price model.
|
| I'm sure in the long run I am missing out on some really cool
| things but I started noticing this trend of hiding pricing to
| force engagement years ago and I have gotten to a point where I
| simply refuse to play along.
|
| Happy to hear I'm wrong and there is an obvious "Check out our
| prices!" link that I just completely missed...
| epaga wrote:
| Big Amen from me, I was just about to write the same thing.
|
| No pricing page means it's possible I'll end up needing to talk
| to a sales rep or they'll end up wanting a subscription for any
| meaningful features.
| [deleted]
| mattcrail wrote:
| Hey thanks for the feedback. We are certainly not trying to
| hide the pricing - as it happens we created a new landing page
| specifically for this new feature and I forgot to put the
| pricing on it (I'll do that now).
|
| Our pricing currently has a free tier where you don't get any
| of the premium integrations, or a $5 tier where you do.
| However, we are changing it to a flat $10 per month pricing
| plan next week so you can get a bit of a deal for the next 6
| months if you sign up now.
| smhenderson wrote:
| Thanks for letting me know, that's pricing that tells me I
| should spend more time looking into your product.
|
| And for the record, I wasn't trying to single you out or pick
| on your site - I find myself getting more and more impatient
| with company's not being upfront about their pricing over the
| years so it's basically the first thing I look for these
| days.
| mattcrail wrote:
| I agree 100% - this happened to me yesterday in fact when
| we were looking at Paddle for payment/subscription
| processing and signing up/finding out the pricing required
| speaking with sales, so we decided to not keep looking into
| it.
| ziggus wrote:
| I've seen a lot of these kinds of tools come and go, and this one
| looks as good if not better than most of the others. However,
| they're all missing out on a huge market: people in delegate or
| what's normally known as "Executive Assistant" roles, who are
| managing someone else's calendar and need a way to control what
| calendar items, invitations, responses, etc. their executives are
| seeing.
|
| I have yet to see any tool that serves that market at all. If
| there was a tool that could help people in those kinds of roles,
| particularly if there was functionality to 'automatically' setup
| meetings a la Doodle (which is garbage), it would sell like
| hotcakes.
| azeirah wrote:
| As someone with ADHD who was never taught how to handle time..
| I think something like this would be very valuable.
|
| I don't need _better_ ways to timeblock my day, I need _any_
| way to timeblock my days that actually works...
| unethical_ban wrote:
| Hm, just today I did something I don't normally do, which is
| timeblock my day! As in not just the meetings I have, but
| wrote down my plan for all the time in between.
|
| Now, I haven't gotten to all of them and some things slipped.
| I have the luxury of that not being a huge issue. Still, it
| felt good knowing that whenever I thought to myself "I should
| be doing something" I already had one and only one thing on
| deck at a given time, literally.
| mattcrail wrote:
| That's an interesting space. Our current users tend to be
| working at earlier stage startups so we don't hear a lot about
| EAs but certainly for enterprise clients I could see how this
| would be a killer feature.
| onion2k wrote:
| _they 're all missing out on a huge market_
|
| That doesn't sound like a huge market. Very few people have an
| assistant these days. That sounds like a few tens of thousands
| of potential customers, although admittedly ones able to afford
| a high premium.
| gandalfff wrote:
| I've been looking for a tool to reduce the friction of
| timeblocking. I find that my estimate for how long things take is
| often wildly incorrect.
|
| Does this tool address those scenarios?
|
| I will give Taskable a try this week.
|
| Congrats!
| egypturnash wrote:
| I've been timeblocking on paper for years with the Pomodoro
| method. One crucial part of that method that's easy to overlook
| is the part where you look back at your records when you finish
| a thing and see how long it took to actually make it, versus
| your initial estimates; doing this helps you develop a sense of
| how long this kind of task will actually take!
|
| One major leap in this for me has been developing a habit of
| also tracking time spent on a project _somewhere in the project
| itself_ ; I'm an artist, and every piece I work on now has a
| layer called "tracking" with a bunch of little hash-marks
| representing a half-hour of work, with other annotations like
| the date and maybe what part of complex pieces I was working
| on. It's now _really_ easy to look back and say "this drawing
| with a complicated library background took 7h".
| mattcrail wrote:
| Yeah - I find this super important too. I readjust my
| calendar entries based on actual time I spent on something so
| I can reflect on it later in the day.
|
| As mentioned, we are going to add in insights/analytics for
| this reason
| mattcrail wrote:
| Awesome - excited to hear your feedback.
|
| We do indeed reduce friction through the integrations, bringing
| your calendar together with tasks from project management tools
| like Jira, Shorcut, Trello, GitHub, Asana, Slack, and even
| email.
|
| In terms of helping you do better estimation - we aren't
| addressing that directly yet with this first version. However,
| we do have plans to build in better insights/analytics that
| will help you better understand where your time is being spent,
| and how accurate you are with your estimations (time allotted
| versus time spent). We'd even love to build a feature that
| learns and begins to suggest expected time for certain tasks.
| mopierotti wrote:
| As an alternative, I use Sunsama, which also lets you drag tasks
| directly to your calendar. (I have not tried Taskable)
| mawise wrote:
| I remember trying out Getting Things Done, really liking the
| idea, and then finding out I had only crappy ways to reference an
| email from my "todo list". Enough of my "work" is "respond to
| this email" that I've never been able to escape my inbox as one
| of my todo lists.
|
| Any ideas on how to build task planning that lets me include link
| directly to an email?
| hesk wrote:
| I guess that my setup is extremely tailored to my needs but it
| requires very little setup so here it goes.
|
| I use Emacs Org-Mode for my todo lists and the default macOS
| Mail.app for email. On a Mac, Org-Mode has a tool that grabs
| the currently selected email and inserts a link to the message
| id into the Org buffer. Clicking on that link opens the message
| in Mail.app.
|
| I try to clean out my email inbox every evening. I track emails
| that need additional work in Org-Mode and immediately move them
| to the email archive after I created the link.
| chrisweekly wrote:
| Maybe search for Tiago Forte's "PARA" system and "one-touch
| inbox"; his workflows might not be precisely what you described
| ("task planning that lets me include link directly to an
| email") but I bet you'd find inspiration to facilitate your
| "escape". Good luck!
| tomjen3 wrote:
| Sell your soul to the ghost of Steve Jobs.
|
| In mail, select some of the text of the email, then share to
| reminders. This creates a reminder with the selected text and a
| link to the email. This also works in iOS.
| mcovalt wrote:
| You can also drag an email from Mail to Reminders. I drag
| email from Mail and links from Safari into Reminders all the
| time.
| mattcrail wrote:
| Yeah - I know that problem well.
|
| We have a Gmail integration where you can star an email, and
| then it syncs to Taskable as a task (and links back to the
| original email). Once checked off, it also archives the gmail
| message.
|
| That way you can star things that require follow up, and get to
| them later, and archive the rest.
|
| We have a lot more to build on the email side of things - such
| as surfacing important emails for you, or even being able to
| respond quickly to emails right from Taskable so you go to your
| inbox less, where you can get sucked down rabbit holes very
| easily.
| gazelle21 wrote:
| sdoering wrote:
| Cool solution. Sadly not for ne stuck in corporate firewalled MS
| Outlook.
|
| But I love to see when somebody builds stuff to solve a problem.
| And I believe that at least I can cheer them on and wish the best
| for them.
|
| Congrats.
| mattcrail wrote:
| Thanks! We are going to add Outlook soon but nothing we can do
| about the firewall for the time being
| fapi1974 wrote:
| Make this collaborative and you've got yourself something
| fundable: https://www.finsmes.com/2022/01/clockwise-
| raises-45m-in-seri...
| mattcrail wrote:
| We are planning team features down the line - right now trying
| to stay laser-focused on individual users :)
| jeremyis wrote:
| Can't you accomplish this by just making calendar events? What am
| I missing?
| mattcrail wrote:
| You can, but it requires a lot more admin of copying and
| pasting tasks/descriptions into your calendar from your task or
| project manager, and having to maintain/update in two separate
| tools.
|
| For people not using task or project managers, often the
| calendar is enough (and indeed becomes their task manager).
| However, if you have tasks coming from everywhere, we make it
| super easy to do timeblocking quickly/efficiently.
| garrickvanburen wrote:
| Just stop using a To Do List separate from the calendar itself.
|
| No need for an extra tool for this.
| [deleted]
| augustwollter wrote:
| I really like the look of this, and just played around with it.
| Thanks for listening to my feedback as well Matt, looking forward
| to see how Taskable evolves.
| mattcrail wrote:
| Thanks for trying it out and sharing feedback! We love to hear
| from users, particularly about things we can improve on so
| appreciate you taking the time.
| TheSocialAndrew wrote:
| Not to hijack your thread, I'll give this a try, but I've
| recently started using Sorted for this type of task management
| and the feature I find most important is the ability to shift the
| time blocks easily just by selecting them and scrolling the mouse
| cursor to defer them all to a later time by +30 minutes, +1 hour,
| etc.
| mattcrail wrote:
| I was just thinking about this actually because I had something
| cancelled in the afternoon and wanted to just move everything
| forward by two hours. We'll add it to the roadmap!
| NikolaNovak wrote:
| Ignorant question - but I assume this is not something that those
| of us stuck in "Enterprise IT / Big Corpo" can easily benefit
| from?
|
| * I don't see Outlook/Exchange as part of Integrations (let alone
| more fun stuff like Lotus Notes etc :P)
|
| * I assume it'd be essentially impossible to open ports, gain
| permission, pass security task list, bribe system administrators
| and security control officers etc for individual to integrate
| this into their enterprise email system
| mattcrail wrote:
| Hey Nikola - we don't yet support Outlook but it's something we
| are planning to do in the next couple weeks.
|
| Indeed you are right - we've generally steered away from
| enterprise users because of those reasons, and instead target
| startups/SMEs because generally the person using our product is
| also an admin.
|
| However, we do want to target enterprises eventually so at some
| point we'll have to figure all that out.
| sdoering wrote:
| Sadly exactly my thought stuck in MSO 365 outlook for corporate
| life. And havi g multiple clients with different stakeholders
| and multiple projects per client is calendar hell in itself.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2022-01-19 23:01 UTC)