Show HN: A better way to timeblock your day(taskablehq.com) |
Show HN: A better way to timeblock your day(taskablehq.com) |
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.
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.
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.
I don't think I would ever get an executive assistant, even if I were to someday be in a place to afford one. Hypothetically speaking, I get the idea that frugality can be a burden, and it sometimes makes sense to spend money to save time.
However, I personally value making the time and practicing the skill of prioritizing tasks for myself. I just generally like to be self-reliant when I have the option.
"Huge" is NaN, so I did a Google and the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics says the TAM is half a million Executive Secretaries and Executive Administrative Assistants in the United States alone.
Uh, frankly, you don't know what you're talking about. Just because the people you work with don't, doesn't mean that your experience is universal.
Most execs or C-level employees are going to have at least one exec assistant, if not more.
Imagine the work you have to do to manage a busy calendar, then multiply it by 10. Then add in responsibility for booking travel, managing events, managing multiple email accounts, etc. for a number of people, and you can start to imagine how amazing it would be to have better tools to do something like managing an exec's calendar.
I speak from (limited) experience: my wife is an EA and sometimes I show her tools like this and she always asks 'can it handle delegate roles?', and every time I have to concede that, no, they don't.
I don't need _better_ ways to timeblock my day, I need _any_ way to timeblock my days that actually works...
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.
Any ideas on how to build task planning that lets me include link directly to an email?
It's the enemy of "flow".
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.
Does this tool address those scenarios?
I will give Taskable a try this week.
Congrats!
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.
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".
As mentioned, we are going to add in insights/analytics for this reason
* 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
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.
- Noteplan 3 - https://noteplan.co/
- DayCaptain - https://daycaptain.com/
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.
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.
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
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
No need for an extra tool for this.
It's like markdown for planning your day.
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.
As I'm sure you're aware, lots of us have migrated away from GMail.
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.
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.
Found it several years ago and used it regularly for a while. It has a nice mixed model for blending calendar, email, lists, tasks. Lots of drag and drop capability, keyboard shortcuts. Loads fast. Mobile app. Customizable views you can quickly switch between, e.g. 3 column email on left, tasks in the middle, calendar on the right.
Google, your Tasks app is cr@p ...
The biggest habits to make time blocking work I see would be:
i) Checking the system (paper/software) regularly)
ii) Capturing all the to-dos, and making sure none are just floating in the mind
iii) Having clear reminders for deadlines and prompts to review tasks that aren't working in a while
When I use a time blocking system well, I'm good at getting lots of tasks done. The biggest obstacles are when a task takes a lot longer than anticipated due to complexity; if I fall behind and don't check the manager; or if I schedule some tasks for someday/far-in-the-future, then forget to review them regularly.
So in short, I think most systems work (with cloud sync and organizational features for software systems as an added luxury), but the biggest obstacle to effectiveness is not checking it enough, often caused by feeling overwhelmed with tasks. Solutions to this include: committing to less, taking breaks, and staying healthy with exercise & sleep for the basics.