If you're doing Painless Software Schedules on OSX, think about doing them in the $29.99 OmniOutliner. It's incredibly easy and, unlike Spolsky's recommendation of $1,099 Microsoft Excel, let's you manage subtasks effortlessly. This leds to more detailed schedules, which in turn leds to more precise and reusable scheduling.
The OmniOutliner even knows about work days. Say that statistics have you at five productive hours a day. Tell that to the OmniOutliner and a task taking 11 hours will be booked for two days and one hour. Oh, and don't worry about sharing your schedule. OmniOutliner exports to ascii, HTML, and OPML.
Already have OmniOutliner and what to spare yourself the trouble of building a template like the one above? Download my Schedule Stationary.
You got a serious interest in gizmos whether they are hardware or software. I always like when you go on a rant about some piece of software that can increase your productivity (I assume this is one such).
IMO those kinds of utilities are entirely unsuited to computers. Paper and a pen does better, cheaper.
Excellent - I've been using OmniOutliner to write assignments, and other writing task, never really explored this type of use and feature. And Fafner, pen and paper is great. Until you need to quickly rearrange ideas, points etc etc. Oh and until you need to publish your ideas onto the web - http://radio.weblogs.com/0104487/outlines/aR/activeRenderer.html. I Outlinining is becoming a bit like religion - people seem to really, really need to tell other non-converts how amazing it all is! And they're right, it's an amazing productivity tool.
When I try to download your "Schedule Stationary" for OmniOutliner ( from the page ), I get connected to a web page that looks like a script/code. Is this what I am supposed to get? If so, what am I supposed to do with it?
Save the entire document (in Safari that's command+s) to disk, then append ".ooutline" to the file name, and say yes when OS X asks whether it should ditch ".txt" in favor of ".ooutline". That'll do it.
The reason you're getting that is that the Web server doesn't understand OmniOutliner's ".ooutline" filename extension. The Web server just treats it as text to be dsiplayed in a browser window. You have to edit the MIME types served by the Web server to fix that.
Besides doing a "save as" for the link in your browser, there's not really much you can do on your computer's end when you're downloading.
Sigh. Mac OS X uses all sorts of new filename extensions. My pet peeve is that the Web server at work doesn't understand ".dmg" so I have to use MacBinary II or BinHex to encode Mac OS X files for download, even when they don't need it. Most Mac OS X files -- and all .dmg disk images -- do not need to be encoded in MacBinary II or BinHex, because they are already flat files (no resource forks).
on MOS X browsers you can download any linked file by simply [option] clicking it! If you miss the link, you'll end up with the html doc you're in though...
I'm a looser on schedules: thanks for sharing your insights...
Challenge by jetlagged on April 16, 16:38
OmniOutliner does not calculate the "Left" column.
It's easier with a spread sheet.
I've mentioned the desire to get vertical calculations in OO for Omni, but it's really a minor issue, IMHO. You just do it by hand. A slight inconvience that's more than made up for in the ease of producing such schedules in OO and the increased overview you get from its outlining nature.
Challenge by Rafa Romero on May 03, 18:29
Just control-click and choose "Download Link to Disk" or something similar (depending on wich browser you're using)
I've talked about my own scheduling with OmniOutliner previously: http://www.disobey.com/dnn/2003/09/index.shtml#001554 and http://www.disobey.com/detergent/2003/omnioutliner.jpg. I ended up moving away from Joel's system, largely because of the "8 hour day" system of Omni. My days are never 8 hours, and there was no apparent way to turn off the automatic day conversions. Instead, I've gone to a "how is this item going to improve my life?" sort of system, one which probably won't map clearly to day-to-day slave-labor.
You edit the day length in OmniO's info palette -- splodge-shift-i. On a column set to "duration" you get the option to set your own hours/day, hours/week, hours/month.
If anyone else wants horizontal calculations in OO they should mail a request to Omni. I'm told that they weight new features by the number of requests.
The OmniOutliner even knows about work days. Say that statistics have you at five productive hours a day. Tell that to the OmniOutliner and a task taking 11 hours will be booked for two days and one hour. Oh, and don't worry about sharing your schedule. OmniOutliner exports to ascii, HTML, and OPML.
If anyone else wants horizontal calculations in OO they should mail a request to Omni. I'm told that they weight new features by the number of requests.
If anyone else wants horizontal calculations in OO they should mail a request to Omni. I'm told that they weight new features by the number of requests.
