I’ve only just started using the ‘Estimated Duration’ field - as an experiment… might be quite useful :-) .
Although ‘30 mins’, ‘1 hour’ etc display perfectly in the Inspector, I always get zeros (‘00:00’) in the Forecast Perspective.
What am I doing wrong, please?
TIA!
@MarkSealey are those zeros the time fields? I think you may have to enable the est duration field in the perspective editor.
I’d love to hear how you use est duration perspectives to your advantage.
I do set est durations for small chores and sometimes in large projects, and have a perspective focusing on durations. I have to be honest it is not that useful to me. I think Omni could make it more useful.
Thanks so much, revstu, that was it: I can now see them. Yes, I think I need to see how useful they are. Just experimenting.
What are your thoughts on how Omni could make them more useful?
Thanks again!
@MarkSealey Over the years I have dabbled with estimated time perspectives and then subsequently deleted them due to lack of use.
I feel it is one of the weakest areas of OF, a function that makes you wonder why it’s there because it has a limited use case. I feel better functionality could make it worthwhile.
Currently I use it to estimate likely durations of chores or some projects, to have some indication what tasks may be done quickly or not. To be honest I don’t find it very useful.
It might be more useful if durations for a certain number of tasks could be added up and totals given, ie; giving a total time for the entire project.
I think this function has been long overlooked. Omni could remove this feature and I wonder if anyone would notice?
I hope they improve it’s purpose and functionality so that users will want to input durations and have a need for perspectives that make good use of it.
I would like to follow up on how you manage to work with them.
If anyone else in the forum has advice I’m all ears!
Thanks! Makes sense. It may be one of those things which just sits there, and is happily used by some - doing no ‘harm’ to others.
I agree, though, so far, I haven’t really thought of using it very actively :-)
Or maybe some sort of aggregation which would reveal what was actually feasible for any one day.
And even prompted the user to ‘think again’ if they’d inadvertently overloaded themselves with tasks for any one day (or week, month, year!)
I’m going to experiment. And - since most of my tasks and projects are (in) SAL’s (I’m retired and use OF for ‘life management’, not work) and so not time-critical etc - see if I can use these as morale-boosters, to convince me that they’re really not going to take too long after all :-)
Your help and suggestions appreciated. BTW, I see you’ve got severe weather coming in Scotland!
@MarkSealey these are great suggestions! I don’t know if any iteration will make this feature any more useful to me, but I’d like to see changes implemented that would encourage me to think of tasks in terms of their duration. It seems a logical and sensible thing to do, but I rarely refer to any perspective configured for duration estimation. However, I am just repeating myself.
I like your aggregation suggestion. I hope you’ve emailed it in as a potential new feature request? To know you’ve got a limited number of hours free and too many tasks to accomplish would be a very worthy feature to add to this superb system.
Regarding weather reports: Looking out my window at the moment it is dreich (Scots for rainy miserable weather), and not particularly any worse than any other dreich day in the West of Scotland, or is there a unknown weather event heading our way? Any chance of sending some nice Californian sunshine? You must be sick of all that brightness and heat? Send some our way!!!
Thanks, @revstu - No, I haven’t suggested that to Omni. I should, shouldn’t I?
For anyone who bills by the hour, time could be useful. Though not necessarily as an estimate.
Presumably the ability to sort by time could also be useful… start the short (or the long depending on your temperament) tasks first etc.
At the moment (with the temperature set to climb to 105° by the weekend, and California’s renewed determination to take up ballroom dancing last week - 7.1 is the strongest I’ve experienced in over 20 years here), dreich (and particularly drench) look very attractive… the grass must truly be greener no matter what.
I met some Californians last week in Glasgow (at my son’s and their daughter’s graduation ceremony). They said the weather here was a welcome change. This proves my point that human beings always complain about anything!
Yes :-)
And (or?) that we always look forward to anything!
I really like the idea of knowing the sum of estimated duration time in a view (e.g., project, flagged list, Forecast tag list) and think that would be helpful. I use estimated duration for the sole purpose of being able to identify quick hits when I have a few minutes. For example, if I have 30-45 minutes to kill, being able to see all my available tasks with a duration of 15 minutes will often result in me getting at least a couple done. I don’t remember to use it as frequently as I wished I did.
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