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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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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]