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Comment by elsherbini | Hacker News Reader

I really love the idea. I use pomodoro timing for my work, but I always have to decide on the spot what I want to do for that 25 minutes. If I'm working on one task, that's easy, but after I'm at a good stopping point with that task it's hard. I like the idea of mindfully making the todo list every day or week.

Three pieces of feedback:

1) I have to click "done" after editing anything and if I forget and click on something else it undoes my edit. I'd prefer edits to be saved automatically.

2) I think the defaults should be 6 hours or 8 hours available for each weekday.

3) It wasn't immediately clear to me how to proceed after planning. I edited the url to go back to the root and then saw the timing functionality. Maybe something that helps first time users find the "Today" button top-left.

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Love the idea and giving it a shot.

My biggest initial recommendation is this:

"Give breaks" is broken as implemented. As somebody who uses pomodoro: a task is 4 hours or 8 pomodoro sessions; it's an estimate that includes my breaks. Don't make me do the math and don't make me have weird 2 number estimates for no reason.

e.g. If a plan is about 4 hours I need to enter 4 hours - 8 x 5 breaks or 3 hours and 20 minutes. Estimates of 3h20m seem really exact when it's really how you represent "about 4 hours" in your app.

If I start the plan and realize it's really going to be more like 6 hours I have to do that all over again and change two numbers again.

Other issues: 1) Same as the OC. e.g. changed all the times on the hours per day but didn't click any of the dones, 7 changes lost. UX principle: don't require confirmation on easy to correct changes. 2) No keyboard navigation. 3) I have to double or triple click all the time. e.g. change name of "untitled plan" is 3 clicks. Change number of hours in a plan 2 clicks

The rationale for the "done" UX is that there's validation too. If you allocate too much time it'll warn ya before saving.

6 hours is a bit much default IMO, not everyone is a freelancer/workaholic.

> not everyone is a freelancer/workaholic.

No, most people work 8 hour days...

And I second the issue with clicking Done - I wanted to set up a work week, and clicked Monday's time slot, started typing (keystrokes didn't go anywhere), clicked the hour time entry, then could enter 8 hours. Repeated for each work day, then clicked Done for Friday, and saw that it lost all the other day entries, and I had to go back through the process of setting up times on M-Th...

Then decided I'd come look at this another time.

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