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Comment by gcr | Hacker News Reader

I like the idea of combining a todo list and a calendar.

Here's a UI concept:

Every day, it shows me the standard 9-5 "time grid" of 30-minute blocks. Maybe it would show them a week into the future too, like the 'week' view of a calendar app.

Underneath, I'd have my stack of TODO items. Every morning, I would drag a few items into the blank spaces on the calendar to plan my day. Then, I could check things off as I finish them. If I fall behind, no bigs: just drag the old items onto tomorrow's time grid sometime.

I've tried to simulate this with Trello. That's a great way to get the 'TODO' part down, but it isn't so great for planning my time.

I've tried this with Org-mode. This really comes the closest out of all of them.

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Literally started wireframing this exact thing this morning, although with the default resolution, if you will, being a week. My plan was to be able to preset a small catalogue of "templates" for various days (eg I always have to put the bins out on Sunday, because garbage day is Monday - so my Sunday template will have a put the bins out task at 7pm every single time), then fill up the work hours with work tasks. After a late night conversation with some buddies about how each of us asks our wife several times a day what we are meant to be doing, exactly, at that moment, I just want a todo app that can answer the question for me.

Gonna have a crack at Elixir for this, should be a fun project for getting to grips with a new lang.

This sounds exciting! Please post this to HN when you'd like some feedback, I'd be quite excited if it ever becomes useful enough to try.

Don't get me wrong, it's gonna be a while, but I'll certainly be making whatever...this...ends up being available to all

I wanted to work on something similar, so let me share my view:

I really like Trello, and my idea was an app where you had a different page per day (Today, Tomorrow, etc.) and you could import tasks from Trello. When marked as done on the app, the Trello card would be automatically moved from the "Todo" list to the "Done" list (or archived).

So you'd use Trello to enter all the stuff you planned to work on, and the app to schedule the when.

I never investigated the Trello API enough to know if this is feasible. But they have a writable API, so I think it's possible.

Both you and comment parent might find this interesting: A few years back a friend and I designed a web-app that had as its core difference the ability to automatically schedule all of your tasks (based on estimated workunits / pomodori and deadlines) around all of your existing appointments and free time. At its core, it could answer the question: "What should I be working on now?" -- but it could do this in about 1 second (that's how long the solver took) for the coming 3 months. You could redo this analysis every time anything changed, and it would present you with a new 3 month planning. We didn't get any further than (working!) prototype with 30 beta testers.

If you're interested, here's an extremely short write-up of what happened: http://timescapers.com/2016/02/07/timescapers-and-timerank-r...

That's super cool, thanks for the info. I might hit you up at a (much) later date for a chat about it!

You mean like this:

https://www.azendoo.com/calendar/

I've never used it, but it appears to be what you're describing.

Thanks for the tip! Azendoo seems super complicated: I think I want something closer to a simple "Tack Todo Items Onto a Calendar" system, without all of the inter-personal messaging or project tracking overhead that azendoo, asana, and the other "How to herd a group of 20 people" systems have.

Hey gcr - just saw your comment about Azendoo being complicated ;-) . We are seen as one of the most straight forward tools on the market at moment but you really need to see a demo of the tool to understand why! I would be delighted to run you through one quickly (15 mins) to give you and idea of the tool - and how you can manage a todo on our calendar. Would his interest you?

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