[plaid]

One thing that makes it difficult to get into a regular routine of using Bonsai every day, is scheduling. I know that some time managements systems such as GTD are not big on scheduling as your day can change at the drop of a hat, but I find if I look at just a list, nothing much happens, but if I have created a schedule, I try to stick to it and am much more productive. The problem is that I can't figure out an easy way to do scheduling in Bonsai. I can link tasks to the calendar, but can't schedule them anyway. I can do some workarounds like starting the task with a time such as 11:00 do this stuff, 13:00 do that stuff, etc. but find this unsatisfactory. Does anyone have any other ideas for scheduling, or do I need to always re-enter some of the tasks to be calendar items?

[Richard Murphy]

Can you expand on what you are looking for? Are you looking for a "calendar view" in Bonsai? Would using a flat filter sorted on some field (i.e. priority, due date, etc) to generate you task list help? Or are you looking for the ability to configure your tasks to be linked so tasks X, Y and Z need to be done in order and cannot be worked on concurrently. A delay in finishing X delays Y and Z as well. Bonsai has a next action filter that will filter out tasks so only the "next action" items (task X in this case) are visible while others are hidden (Y and Z in this case). If you are looking for more of a project management tool that can better handle tasks and multiple resources, you might want to look at Natara's Project@Hand.

[plaid]

Richard Murphy, on Jun 23 2009, 11:08 PM, said:

Can you expand on what you are looking for? Are you looking for a "calendar view" in Bonsai? Would using a flat filter sorted on some field (i.e. priority, due date, etc) to generate you task list help? Or are you looking for the ability to configure your tasks to be linked so tasks X, Y and Z need to be done in order and cannot be worked on concurrently. A delay in finishing X delays Y and Z as well. Bonsai has a next action filter that will filter out tasks so only the "next action" items (task X in this case) are visible while others are hidden (Y and Z in this case). If you are looking for more of a project management tool that can better handle tasks and multiple resources, you might want to look at Natara's Project@Hand.

I'm not really thinking about true dependencies, more a way to quickly/easily get a picture of my day, to organize my day. I think I'm looking for three different things:

* One thing I'm looking for is a basic calendar view. For example, I'm a visual person so if I'm looking at a weeks worth of tasks and it's all just one long list, I don't seem to get a real sense of what my load per day is. I know this may be beyond the scope of Bonsai, but some other outliners (LB and MLO) have a block week view I think, like this:

Monday........| Thursday
-------------------------------
Tuesday.......| Friday
-------------------------------
Wednesday..| Sat/Sun
-------------------------------
* Another way this could be done - perhaps even better, is to use a little month calendar like in Daynotez. Days that have tasks due would be bold, and clicking on the day could automatically date-filter the currently viewed items. This could be done a couple of different ways.
1. Clicking on a bold date in the calendar would clear any filters and just show everything due on that date, or
2. Clicking on a bold date in the calendar could just override any date filtering, showing items that are due that day if they also match anything else in a current filter (text match, category, keyword etc.). This would be very helpful to quickly see what is due on a certain date three weeks from now without having to pre-define a whole bunch of filters. Actually, Bonsai could really benefit to have a quick way to add any ad hoc filters, not just by date (filter by text comes to mind!)

* A third thing that could help (and this is idea is what triggered my request in the first place) would be to create a special kind of "flat list" that allowed you to move items into the order you plan to do them, rather than having to rely on a sort. It would be great to have a list of stuff due today and push them into the order I'd like, rather than using some cumbersome way such as changing priorities etc just so it will sort the way I want. Sorting by item index doesn't do what I want because then I have to mess with my whole outline. Perhaps adding a time field would take care of this, as I could then filter by today, and then sort by time? A time field would be helpful anyways for when you (hint hint) add alarms etc.

Do you think any of these three items would be doable?

[plaid]

plaid, on Jun 25 2009, 04:30 PM, said:

...without having to pre-define a whole bunch of filters. Actually, Bonsai could really benefit to have a quick way to add any ad hoc filters, not just by date (filter by text comes to mind!)

Hey, that didn't take long! The new quick filters in v5 beta help a lot with this. Thanks!