I really like the concept of planned times, and am sooooo happy that it has been added. Maybe it’s me, but the forecast view and the timing of planned timing just isn’t working for me. I would really like to be able to visually plan my day, and after spending way too much time fiddling with OF instead of actually working, I’m just going to toss out here what I would like to see. Or what I think I’d like to see:
My planned events show up on my calendar, just like all the other appointments in my life. Since Planned tasks have a start time, and an estimated time, wouldn’t it be relatively straightforward to be able to publish planned events as a calendar? Visually, it would help plan my day and also see when I am over and under booked.
Right now I can manually drop those in to my calendar and do things that way (which I do, and I really love that there is a link back to OF so I can easily check things off as completed), but it seems like with the new Planned time field, we can eliminate a lot of the manual work on this front?
I can see how you might like that approach. I tend to agree with David Allen that calendar appointments are for things that must happen at the scheduled time or on a particular day. I do keep a separate calendar for things that are optional, if I have time, and I occasionally enter time blocks to focus on specific areas of responsibility, but I think the planned date feature works well as implemented, for my way of working.
I guess if you think of planned actions as appointments with yourself, it does make sense, but for me, I’ll only do that if there is a task I’m really resisting doing and that I have to try to force myself to do.
Again, I can see how you and others might like such a feature, but for the benefit of readers, I wanted to offer a different perspective.
While I use Planned Dates, I don’t add times. If you compared my OF Database with my Work Calendar, you’d see that I have blocked out time on my Work Calendar on the days I’ve set planned times.
But as OF would not be able to add those items to my Work Calendar for others to see, the feature would not be useful (and would require extra work on my part to use.
Some time ago I made an Apple Shortcut that does this for items with a deadline date. You get an event with title and note of the action as well as a jump URL to the original event in case you want to go its OF action. Duration is based on action duration and a default duration is used in case non is set. It even updates the existing events in case of date/time changes. It corrects events in the calendar that got accidentally moved. The deadline time marks the end of the event so start date is calculated backwards.
Did a first prototype to convert it to planned date. I would have to do some modifications in case there‘s a demand for a fully working version.
