Hey hackers! I've got something exciting to share: Nautilus Omnibus. It's not your typical time-blocking tool. The public prototype offers a unique circular day view that automatically advances all unfinished tasks. I initially developed this as a personal project (in Roam Research) and saw significant improvements in my productivity over several months. I then decided to share it with the world as a plugin for Roam.

Later, I shared some thoughts about Nautilus in an article (https://lifehacky.net/how-i-learned-to-plan-better-and-what-...), and many users expressed the need for a more accessible version of the tool.

As I am not a programmer (but a book publisher), it took some time... :) However, now everyone can try it regardless of their preferred platform.

Time-blocking is about dedicating blocks of time to focused work and other activities, balancing various aspects of life, and reducing the stress of an overflowing to-do list. In my experience, this approach can help precisely with this: it keeps track of what I can and cannot finish during the day.

I would love for you to try it out and share your feedback. Your insights are invaluable and will help improve Nautilus further. Check it out here; it is free and runs only in the browser (your data are not transferred):

https://nautilus-omnibus.web.app

I'm looking forward to hearing your thoughts!

Interesting tool.

I’ll be honest it was very confusing at first, but I think I get it.

I’d work really hard on simplifying the instructions into a few Bulletpoints only , maybe even iterating on the idea.

In my opinion you literally have about 5 seconds tops to get an idea across to most users on the internet, people have no attention spans. For this reason most of my product demos are a gif of the tool under 10 seconds.

I knew I was looking at a time tracking tool but I couldn’t immediately tell what the numbers are meant to represent. Are they days of the month? Time? 24 hour time? I figured it out eventually.

But it’s too much to take in visually and may put people off and prevent people picking it up.

Why does the day only start at 6am/7/8? Why does it end at set times?

The colours of tasks should be autogenerated otherwise it’s hard to tell tasks apart visually.

The nautilus shape is cool, but is it a necessity? It does add some complexity to the tool visually.

Think it has potential. Site is not very mobile optimised though.

Keep up the good work!

Maybe an improvement I’d like to see could be to have the nautilus shift tasks every hour and keep the current hour block at the top of the nautilus?

So you would fix the current hour block at top of the nautilus, and everything before or after this hour block should be grayed out. Really pull the focus into one section of the nautilus. Then when the hour is up, shift everything along to the next section.

Therefore the user is visually drawn into “what do I need to do now?” And less visual attention is given to upcoming tasks, but they are still available to view, just slightly grayed out

I love it! The concept of moving disk towards the end of the day put the right amount of pressure and urgency. Now I can see that I will not be able to squeeze as many things as I eagerly planned for forcing me to prioritize better. For this to work better for me the current time marker should always stay on top, while the disk moves toward the end of the day symbolized as the darkness at the end of the disk, the impending doom of negligence

Love it! Really well thought out. Looking forward to trying this out tomorrow.

Explorer it so far, here are a couple of pointers that I think would make it better for me: * I'd like the Nautilus to be larger, so maybe have that on the left and the text input on the RHS next to it? * The shading of the yellow and blue areas seems to subtle and difficult to tell apart on my screen. Would it be possible to have those more distinct? * Some keyboard shortcuts would be great, e.g. for quickly reordering tasks; maybe something like Ctrl+J/K or CTRL+Arrow keys?

Overall, the Nautilus shape is a bit foreign at first and I don't immediately have an intuitive sense of it but I think that's just unfamiliarity and would quickly change with time. With a bit of training so that the shape becomes second nature then I think this will be awesome for productivity! At that point I'd love to be able to use this in a standalone app, maybe an Electron app or something like that.

Anyone planning to bring this to Obsidian?

why can't I start my day at noon?