Back To Time Management.

By: David Slonosky

Well, summer's over, might as well get back to time management. I'm going to be juggling a lot of stuff myself in the next month, so it's good for me to remind myself what's important in life. Farewell, shorts and golf shirts. Farewell.

Regular readers (there must be some out there, right?) know that I am a big fan of the Getting Things Done methodology and the various tools you can use electronically to work with it. (Yes, you can use paper and pencil just as well, but I am a big nerd, so I don't.)

Recently, though, I came across a program that reminded me of another approach to tracking your tasks. TimeTo (http://www.timeto.org) bills itself as "the World's most advanced to-do list manager". I'm not sure what to call the philosophy behind it, so I will call it schedule-based task management.

This is a very complex program and has more bells and whistles than I care to mention. But to be fair, so does Ecco, my favourite task and calendar tracker to date. And with both, you can use a fraction of the functionality easily even though it is the core functionality. (Which I think is a nice way to design software.)

TimeTo allows you to enter seven different types of items. I haven't tried inserting any except a normal item and an appointment item. With each item, you can basically enter a duration, an optional start time, and an optional recurring schedule. What makes this different is that you can give a duration of longer than a day to an item, and then indicate that TimeTo should split the time you have allocated over multiple days.

What is the use of this, you ask? The use is that TimeTo also has a task balancer, so it takes any tasks where you have entered a long duration and allowed it to have the block of time split over multiple days and then splits them depending on what other items you have entered.

It sounds confusing reading it, but basically if it is going to take 40 hours to clean your garage and you have 7 hours set aside for work today, then depending on how you set up your garage cleaning item, TimeTo might balance it out so that you have 1, 2, or no hours allocated to this day. It would further split out hours over the remaining days until the 40 hours were all used.

And if you enter new items and they "interfere" with your garage cleaning, then when you rebalance your time, the program will also rebalance your garage cleaning.

It also contains a calendar function, address book, telephone dialer, basically all the things you would want in a PIM.

Do I like it? I think it's elegant and the balancing works really well. But for me, it's all a bit of overkill. I like the simplicity of GTD better where no scheduling is made for a task unless there is some compelling outside force requiring a schedule. So my little list of task ticklers in Ecco is enough for me. But if you like precision in every day, then TimeTo might be worth a look at. (Note that TimeTo is charityware, but you can evaluate it for a fair length of time.)