from Hacker News

Show HN: A better way to timeblock your day

by mattcrail on 1/19/22, 4:54 PM with 75 comments

• by tgdnt on 1/20/22, 1:38 AM

  There was an app called Timeful that got acquihired by Google who promptly shut it down. What that app did that was actually good was you could have a simple todo list and you could drag it to your calendar, just like your app. They went on and on about "AI" and how they were going to blow everyone's minds at Google, but all many of us wanted was just a good old drag and drop. Timeful was only on mobile, and had an extremely simple interface. I think it just had one view, tasks on top, today's agenda below them. Another important thing was that you could kind of set aside events in your calendar, so they would show up as just a line on the left side of the agenda view, for events that don't actually tie you up, so you can still put some todo in.

• by haney on 1/19/22, 7:59 PM

  I've been using reclaim.ai for time blocking and really liking it. One additional feature reclaim.ai has is "smart" 1:1s which help me to schedule recurring meetings with my team (which is super helpful with our WFH global team).

  There seem to be several calendar management apps competing in this space right now, excited to see more productivity features being built from the competition.

• by ziggus on 1/19/22, 9:12 PM

  I've seen a lot of these kinds of tools come and go, and this one looks as good if not better than most of the others. However, they're all missing out on a huge market: people in delegate or what's normally known as "Executive Assistant" roles, who are managing someone else's calendar and need a way to control what calendar items, invitations, responses, etc. their executives are seeing.

  I have yet to see any tool that serves that market at all. If there was a tool that could help people in those kinds of roles, particularly if there was functionality to 'automatically' setup meetings a la Doodle (which is garbage), it would sell like hotcakes.

• by mawise on 1/19/22, 6:02 PM

  I remember trying out Getting Things Done, really liking the idea, and then finding out I had only crappy ways to reference an email from my "todo list". Enough of my "work" is "respond to this email" that I've never been able to escape my inbox as one of my todo lists.

  Any ideas on how to build task planning that lets me include link directly to an email?

• by davidw on 1/19/22, 5:59 PM

  I get anxious when I have some kind of ... time thing coming up. Meeting, have to go get a kid from school... it just sits there churning up cycles in my brain.

  It's the enemy of "flow".

• by nefitty on 1/19/22, 5:57 PM

  I haven't used this app. I had to make my own similar tool.

  Anyways, timeblocking changed my life. It was a slog at first. I started off by logging what I actually did.

  "Sit on couch - 12:15 - 4:30" "Walk dog - 4:30 - 4:45" "Sit on couch - 4:45 - 7:00"

  Seeing the patterns I had fallen into was like looking into some sort of chronographic mirror. My fourth dimensional beer belly had gotten pretty big.

  Put my ballot in the "What gets measured gets managed" box.

• by gandalfff on 1/19/22, 5:22 PM

  I've been looking for a tool to reduce the friction of timeblocking. I find that my estimate for how long things take is often wildly incorrect.

  Does this tool address those scenarios?

  I will give Taskable a try this week.

  Congrats!

• by NikolaNovak on 1/19/22, 5:57 PM

  Ignorant question - but I assume this is not something that those of us stuck in "Enterprise IT / Big Corpo" can easily benefit from?

  * I don't see Outlook/Exchange as part of Integrations (let alone more fun stuff like Lotus Notes etc :P)

  * I assume it'd be essentially impossible to open ports, gain permission, pass security task list, bribe system administrators and security control officers etc for individual to integrate this into their enterprise email system

• by augustwollter on 1/19/22, 5:55 PM

  I really like the look of this, and just played around with it. Thanks for listening to my feedback as well Matt, looking forward to see how Taskable evolves.

• by TheSocialAndrew on 1/19/22, 7:17 PM

  Not to hijack your thread, I'll give this a try, but I've recently started using Sorted for this type of task management and the feature I find most important is the ability to shift the time blocks easily just by selecting them and scrolling the mouse cursor to defer them all to a later time by +30 minutes, +1 hour, etc.

• by fapi1974 on 1/19/22, 6:38 PM

  Make this collaborative and you've got yourself something fundable: https://www.finsmes.com/2022/01/clockwise-raises-45m-in-seri...

• by sdfhbdf on 1/20/22, 5:54 AM

  How does this compare to the Focus time feature built into Google Calendar in Google Workspace? https://support.google.com/calendar/answer/11190973

• by joshka on 1/19/22, 6:28 PM

  Looks neat. Some alternatives in a similar space (tasks -> time blocking)

  - Noteplan 3 - https://noteplan.co/

  - DayCaptain - https://daycaptain.com/

• by jeremyis on 1/19/22, 5:41 PM

  Can’t you accomplish this by just making calendar events? What am I missing?

• by sdoering on 1/19/22, 6:04 PM

  Cool solution. Sadly not for ne stuck in corporate firewalled MS Outlook.

  But I love to see when somebody builds stuff to solve a problem. And I believe that at least I can cheer them on and wish the best for them.

  Congrats.

• by dmje on 1/20/22, 12:27 AM

  The landing page looks promising but downloaded the Android app and it's terrifyingly bad. In fact mobile support in general just seems terrible, so I guess I'm out.

• by rememberlenny on 1/19/22, 4:59 PM

  Very neat primitive. Congrats on getting it out!

• by mopierotti on 1/19/22, 7:05 PM

  As an alternative, I use Sunsama, which also lets you drag tasks directly to your calendar. (I have not tried Taskable)

• by mlejva on 1/19/22, 5:01 PM

  What has worked for you to make timeblocking actually effective?

• by smhenderson on 1/19/22, 5:34 PM

  Looks like it could be helpful but after spending over two minutes looking for pricing and not finding it I'll never know.

  I refuse to even try a product that won't be upfront about pricing. Don't 1) tell me I can get two months free, 2) offer to let me take a test drive or 3) ask for my email address before you've given me a chance to review your standard price model.

  I'm sure in the long run I am missing out on some really cool things but I started noticing this trend of hiding pricing to force engagement years ago and I have gotten to a point where I simply refuse to play along.

  Happy to hear I'm wrong and there is an obvious "Check out our prices!" link that I just completely missed...

• by krono on 1/19/22, 5:58 PM

  Time Blocking is a terrible name for the concept. Of the two ways you could interpret it, one makes you feel like Kronos the Lord of Time, and the other will make you hate your calendar/agenda and everything you put on there.

  What does not work: Blocking time. The world will not adapt to how you planned it last Sunday, and no amount of wanting, asking, or even demanding will make it so. Time is fluid, people are selfish, your dog is colourblind and can't read.

  What can work: Blocks of time. An estimation of how the day will go but probably won't. A suggestion to yourself. It is wrong from the outset, but still good enough for you to estimate what tasks could be taken on, maybe discover some efficiency opportunities, and it indicates visually that yes, that thing is due in two days.

• by irrational on 1/19/22, 7:00 PM

  > that way no one can schedule a meeting in your focus time.

  LOL. Oh my sweet summer child. I so wish I lived in your fantasy land where this was remotely true. My experience has been that everyone assumes their stuff is more important than your stuff, so you will reschedule your stuff to make way for their stuff. I’ve worked in a number of places professionally for 25 years and I’ve never seen different.

• by garrickvanburen on 1/19/22, 6:08 PM

  Just stop using a To Do List separate from the calendar itself.

  No need for an extra tool for this.

• by gazelle21 on 1/19/22, 6:17 PM

  This looks great and looking to move from sunsama due to pricing. I don't see an easy way to delete task? I imported a template as test but can't seem to delete task?

• by kirubakaran on 1/19/22, 8:34 PM

  Related free tool (mine) : https://crushentropy.com/

  It's like markdown for planning your day.