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Software that Schedules Your Appointments For You?
Lappie asks: "Say you've got a couple of things to do. Usually, you write them down in your diary, PDA or via some online calendaring solution. In every case YOU decide when to carry out a task based on it's priorities etc. That's not how I like to work. Having used a Psion Revo for a few years now, I got quite used to a program called Mentor which schedules my tasks for me. It may sound scary to some, but it actually works quite well. With my Psion dying on me, I'm trying to find an alternative to Mentor either as Windows, Linux , web-based or PDA based software. However, I haven't been able to find anything after several days of googling around, and I'm getting so desperate that I even considered closed source payware. To date, I can't find a comparable product in the market. Is Mentor and its capabilities a unique piece of software, or have I not looked carefully enough?"
"Based on three criteria, the program determines what tasks you have to do on a given day. The criteria are how committed you are to carrying out the task (committed / must do, fairly committed / upcoming 2-3 days, bonus), when the task should be completed (ASAP, soon / this week, sometime / this month) and how long you plan for the task to take (15m, hour, half a day or a day). Mentor knows how/where to plan tasks because for each, so called, role you play (e.g., Sysadmin, Webmaster, Home etc.) you can assign (repeating) time slots over a day. So Mentor places a task in a time slot when the duration fits the slot and when the 'urgency/priority' variables fit the distance between today and the date when a task has to be completed. Of course, Mentor automatically respects the appointments that you have, and after a quick reschedule every morning, you're all set to go for the day."
Hmm, putting my tin-foil hat on, maybe the Mentor guys DID solve it, but it invited too much heat from one or two of TLAs... ;-)
Paul B.
P.S. Good luck in your search though!
It's called Wife1.0. You won't ever have to worry about not having tasks scheduled for you again. Whatever free time you had will be filled automatically with any number of tedious jobs. Unfortunately, v1.0 it turned out to be ridden with nagware.
I've since gone back to bachelor 1.0 and don't really think about upgrading.
I think you need to reread the original post. Cheers!
If it ain't broke, don't fix it, right?
Been using versions of it for many years, and can't fault it. The web site looks like a leftover from 1995, but don't hold that against them. Windows only, and doesn't run under Wine (at least not the last time I tried).
It supports tasks, projects, statuses, alarms, all that sort of stuff. Notes against items are just text files - easy to search or edit externally if you want to. Tasks can be imported or exported too if you wish.
Being NP Complete doesn't mean it's insolvable, just that the larger the data set, the harder and harder to solve. Odds are that even this NP complete problem is solvable on modern machines (even the small ones) with reasonable data sets.
(And having written similar software, brute force was fast enough to get the job done.)
Or you could just get another Psion off of eBay. They'll probably be available for a long time to come.
I have to mention that overdependence on "Mook" software can lead to loss of actual identity, as described in Bruce Sterling's fiction.
Lessee, 12:00: lunch with Mike, 13:00: complete TPS reports, 14:00: relinquish all world power to the cybernetic race...
Does PlanMyDay sound like it will do the job for you?
See also Manna, a story about such software, and its logical extrapolation.
Actually, it's not NP, it's most certainly polynomial. Turns out that this "scheduling problem" can be arranged into a matroid, and therefore a simple greedy algorithm will work. Basically, this will *always* just end up with the next "highest priority" item that fits into the current time slot.
(For a final note, I'm not in any way affiliated with mathworld.wolfram.com, but it is a useful reference.) ;-)
Christian Jones
Medicine. Mathematics. Mediocrity.
(And yes, I did check my Cormen/Leiserson/Rivest algorithm book AFTER the fact!), but I was going more for Funny than Insightful in my post, you know... ;-)
Paul B.
I read in some forums about the software Life Balance, which sounds like you're describing. You tell it what percentage of time you want to spend on certain things, and it will schedule it for you.
I've never used this, nor know much about it. I've been following the forums on the book Getting Things Done, and some people have liked it.
After years of PDAs, I still like the simplicity of a pen on pencil. Flexable, too!
Admittedly this is a one-two punch, but if you're into organizing your life on Windows, you should already be here.
Taskline is a plug-in for Microsoft Outlook. One of the deficiencies, some users say, of Outlook is it's inability to properly express the time needed to complete tasks versus your actual scheduled appointments. So I'm guessing Taskline works just as your system works now, and that it's what you want.
I love it. It helps me see if projects are actually feasible, and it helps me make better educated guesses as to how much time a project will take. I know when to do certain things, and I can prioritize them, etc... It's great. Completely integrated between the Calendar and Tasks folders and completely removable too. Very neat. It's one of those... Gems of the Internet that I wish I had found years ago. So here it is. Enjoy.
I have the mental capacity to decide for myself what to do when.
Unless you have a million contacts and meetings, in which case you need a secretary, maybe you just need to train your brain a bit.
Organiser: Acknowledged. This appointment is scheduled for.... 5:50PM.
Guy: I was hoping for some time before 12 noon.
Organiser: Sorry, you all booked up. [snikers... and all backed up too]
Guy: But I already have a peeper!
Organiser: I do not understand. [Yes, you have nice brown eye protruding from your read-end. For the rest of the day I hope I'm kept in the front pockets of your pants.]
Guy: Right. So what am I scheduled to be doing now?
Organiser: You have a meeting at the unemployment office. [Patethic carbon based life form]
A demo is at http://www.mekhaye.net/webdev/prioritexter and a .zip of the program (view README after unzip, no install necessary) is at http://www.mekhaye.net/webdev/prioritexter.zip. I made it for *nix with php/mysql but I imagine other platforms would handle it ok.
It should be considered gamma, or delta, or something short of beta. please give me feedback.
Current plans... Last update Mar02. Current Plans... Haha. Good one.
This signiture copied from somewhere.
If you're going to critique someone else's grammar, at least do it correctly.
it is almost and _exact_ clone of this. Gotta run, otherwise I would look up the site.
Palm and Windows, Windows CE I think is coming up.
I run this https with php and mysql. Works really nice. I even have it text message me 15 min for a schedule appt. Highly recommend it. Super easy to install and really fast.
http://www.k5n.us/webcalendar.php
Double plus bad
Erm, maybe buy another Revo? If that's too much, grab one from eBay!
"I'm trying to find an alternative to Mentor either as Windows, Linux , web-based or PDA based software. However, I haven't been able to find anything after several days of googling around, and I'm getting so desperate that I even considered closed source payware."
Erm (again), Mentor *is* closed-source payware!!!!
"I can't find a comparable product in the market. Is Mentor and its capabilities a unique piece of software, or have I not looked carefully enough?"
Mentor are still in business, you like the software and are prepared to pay for it and you could buy a replacement Revo if your existing one kicks the bucket... I don't see the problem here. If you really want an open-source solution, surely you could take the closest fit software and then customise it, failing that *pay* a programmer to do it for you!