Ken wrote:

I hope that Cal's approach works for you, but I suspect that his success
might have less to do with his schedule and more with his personality,
internal motivation and tenure (as it is hard to fire a tenured faculty
for just saying "no"). I would also guess that the success of his
system is dependent on the type of environment that one works in. I am
constantly responding to unplanned requests from those above me in the
form of meetings, emails and dropping by my desk. And the same goes for
my "clients" who also email and call. It would be great to just say
"No" to these people, but I am afraid that my reputation for customer
service would greatly diminished to the point of my getting a bad
reputation. That doesn't mean that setting time aside for tasks is a
bad idea, but I have to agree with Stephen about the need for
flexibility.

I totally understand you Ken.
We all are in a different situations. I see that you have a boss and clients to push tasks on you. I don't have a boss; I have to push myself to get things done.

all the best!

Have you looked into Cronofy? It's a service that can connect your task app to your calendar with a two-way sync. As far as I know, it has support for Trello and Evernote reminders. There might be others.

Dellu wrote:

I totally understand you Ken.
We all are in a different situations. I see that you have a boss and
clients to push tasks on you. I don't have a boss; I have to push myself
to get things done.

all the best!

I do admire your desire for discipline, and if I was working solo, I would probably try the same approach, but "bossing" myself is a bit like ordering around somebody else's pet. I would not expect too much.

And I too, am now interested in Pagico.

Good luck,

--Ken

Different strokes for different folks. I am so UNDISCIPLINED that if I assign a task to a day, and can't get to it, I lose it, of the calendar is the guiding metaphor. So I do better with one list of tasks and another for events. But I see the advantage of the integration.

I’ve been following this thread with interest. I find the idea of tasks as events to be managed in time appealing. Pagico brings some potentially useful graphical tools to the task manager. It’s pricey and I can’t find many reputable reviews (mostly sponsored product placements). Does anyone on the forum have experience with this software and can comment on its functionality compared to better-known software (e.g. Things, OmiFocus, etc)? I downloaded the demo version and it looks complex.
Steve


Ken wrote:

Dellu wrote:
>
>I totally understand you Ken.
>We all are in a different situations. I see that you have a boss and
>clients to push tasks on you. I don't have a boss; I have to push
myself
>to get things done.
>
>all the best!

I do admire your desire for discipline, and if I was working solo, I
would probably try the same approach, but "bossing" myself is a bit like
ordering around somebody else's pet. I would not expect too much.

And I too, am now interested in Pagico.

Good luck,

--Ken

I have a slightly different view of events and tasks. Mostly, if someone else throws a dart at my schedule, pinning me to a time and place not of my choosing, it goes in my calendar. Or, if I have a specific thing at a specific time, that's a calendar event.

I'm simplistic. I use Apple Calendar. Alarms go off to interrupt me, I respond. It works.

If something is under my control, particularly if it's something I can complete early, it's a task. I use OmniFocus.

Meet with Fred at 2:30 on Wednesday, that's an appointment in my calendar. Find Fred and hand off a microfilmed communiqué, that's a task and it can have a deadline.

Where the lines blur is where the Forecast tab in OmniFocus helps out. It's a calendar with my scheduled tasks, and it shows events from Apple Calendar.

But I agree. Everything should have a schedule. If not a strict time, then at least the option to put in a proposed time. That helps with prioritization.

Of course, just my two cent.

Yes, for me calendar events are things I've decided to do at specific times, period.

My main disappointment is the anemic nature of reminders in calendars and to-do apps. I'll often have odd-hour meetings, or set up something for a time I usually don't check my phone or calendar, and my alerts don't alert me. They're one-time pop-ups on the phone or discreet beeps I don't hear if my phone is in my pocket (especially if my headphones are plugged in but not in my ears). So for important or obscure items on my calendar I use Due app on my iPhone, which has a choice of alarms that include loud ones I won't miss, and they're repeatable every X minutes.

If Google Calendar (or one of the 3rd party iOS apps) had this functionality I'd be in hog heaven. Instead, I have one two apps for to-dos (one is Anylist, designed specifically for food shopping), Google Calendar, and duplicated alarms in Due.

I've been using Pagico for the last few months, and frankly, the decision has caused my CRIMPing to diminish considerably (at least as far as task management apps are concerned),

I've invested in all the major players: Todoist, Things, 2Do, OmniFocus, Wunderlist and a host of others.

What puts Pagico into a different league is its overviews, and its flexibility.

You can use it as an outliner. You can use it as a very simple task manager. You can use it as a vastly complex project manager.

So some of my projects are large and complex. These include tasks, notes, attached files, and other goodies. They're usually client-specific, so include tags with client codes, status (e.g. WAITING) and so on. Pagico handles tags very well.

Other projects are simply task lists (like "Personal" or "House"). Sometimes they don't have deadlines, in which case I have a single task that moves from day to day and simply reminds me to check my "House" list from time to time.

This flexibility is underpinned by the Timeline view. This is similar to a GANTT chart, but without the dependencies. You can drag and drop stuff very easily from one day to another. It's a great way to deal with the inevitable "look at all those tasks I haven't done and are now late" scenario: you just drag and drop them onto new dates.

It's much easier to use than a calendar (but Pagico has a calendar view as well, for those who prefer it).

It's not a perfect app, but it's stable, the synchronisation works well, the newly revised iOS app is very nice, and it does everything any other task management app does and more.

And while at first sight, it does appear to be complex, it's actually very easy to use. It's been steadily honed down by the developers from something that was a little too ambitious to something that's - in my view - just right.

It's worth spending a little time familiarising yourself with it at the start. But you get the hang of things very quickly, and I felt totally at home in it after messing about for a day or so. I may say that alternatives such as OmniFocus are at least as complex, and personally I never found OmniFocus to be particularly intuitive or well-designed (the iOS app in particular is a disaster).

I occasionally (being an inveterate CRIMPer) go back and play with other apps (such as the latest rather nice version of Things), but at no point have I felt tempted to leave Pagico. It's also a rather good team solution, if you need such a thing, but I'm assuming most people in the forum don't.

MadaboutDana wrote:

I've been using Pagico for the last few months, and frankly, the
decision has caused my CRIMPing to diminish considerably (at least as
far as task management apps are concerned),

I've invested in all the major players: Todoist, Things, 2Do, OmniFocus,
Wunderlist and a host of others.

What puts Pagico into a different league is its overviews, and its
flexibility.

You can use it as an outliner. You can use it as a very simple task
manager. You can use it as a vastly complex project manager.

Quick question - does it offer subtasks?

--Ken

Ken wrote:

Quick question - does it offer subtasks?

--Ken

I don't think sub-tasks are possible (https://notes17.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/245463727-Please-add-Subtasks

But, it has Lists which keep related tasks together, like a folder.

steve-rogers wrote:

Pagico brings some
potentially useful graphical tools to the task manager. It’s
pricey and I can’t find many reputable reviews (mostly sponsored
product placements). Does anyone on the forum have experience with this
software and can comment on its functionality compared to better-known
software (e.g. Things, OmiFocus, etc)? I downloaded the demo version and
it looks complex.
Steve

Bill has answered your question on the functionality. it is great application indeed. I totally agree with his assessment.
The best part of Pagico for me is its cross-functionality; its omnipresence: android, ios, windows...it is everywhere with good sync.

As for the price, it was a sale a couple of weeks ago. You can search in this forum. right now, your best choice is to buy setapp which contains Pagico and a number of other great applications. Setapp seems on sale this week; you can check Paul's recent post in this forum.

It's seldom that I disagree with Bill's views, but this is one occasion, at least to some extent.

Two or three months ago when Bill (I think) signalled that a significant upgrade of Pagico was available, I updated my copies (macOS and iOS) and devoted a lot of time and effort into putting the upgrade through its paces. I don't regret the time and effort. The upgrade was/is a huge improvement on what went before. But I was still unhappy with it.

I liked all the aspects of its functionality that Bill and others have praised. In particular, I have always liked its Gantt-ish chart. But I still felt that aspects of the application's user interface were awkward and inelegant. There were all those eccentric combinations of upper- and lower-case typefaces that I always found - well - ugly in the Pagico UI, and as far I could see not amenable to modification. Such things matter when you visit an application many times a day.

Also, there were still functions that I found it awkward or difficult to operate or engage with, and steps that didn't quite work as one might have expected. And little things: for example, I customarily have a long list of projects. In Omnifocus the list can be made, just, to fit on my screen. In Pagico, not (as far as I could see).

I don't wish to damn the application. Perhaps if collaboration was important to me (it isn't), I might have stuck with it. I usually admire eccentricity, and it was the combination of tasks and scheduling, then quite eccentric though not unique, that first attracted me to Pagico in the dim and distant past. But not now enough to stick with it, at the moment.

Hugh wrote:

It's seldom that I disagree with Bill's views, but this is one occasion,
at least to some extent.

Two or three months ago when Bill (I think) signalled that a significant
upgrade of Pagico was available, I updated my copies (macOS and iOS) and
devoted a lot of time and effort into putting the upgrade through its
paces. I don't regret the time and effort. The upgrade was/is a huge
improvement on what went before. But I was still unhappy with it.

I liked all the aspects of its functionality that Bill and others have
praised. In particular, I have always liked its Gantt-ish chart. But I
still felt that aspects of the application's user interface were awkward
and inelegant. There were all those eccentric combinations of upper- and
lower-case typefaces that I always found - well - ugly in the Pagico UI,
and as far I could see not amenable to modification. Such things matter
when you visit an application many times a day.

Also, there were still functions that I found it awkward or difficult to
operate or engage with, and steps that didn't quite work as one might
have expected. And little things: for example, I customarily have a long
list of projects. In Omnifocus the list can be made, just, to fit on my
screen. In Pagico, not (as far as I could see).

I don't wish to damn the application. Perhaps if collaboration was
important to me (it isn't), I might have stuck with it. I usually admire
eccentricity, and it was the combination of tasks and scheduling, then
quite eccentric though not unique, that first attracted me to Pagico in
the dim and distant past. But not now enough to stick with it, at the
moment.

Pagico is a little clunky. It looks like a java application--not as fluid as Things and OF. Personally, I find Pagico much more functional than OF. Swamp of features: waste lots of time to get things right the way I want, and then I always find something is missing; most importantly the inability to plan. OF is very annoying app to me: I have tried it many times, watched tutorials, I just decided it is not for me.

it is just interesting how we could be different.

I take Hugh's point entirely - and it's an interesting reflection on people's differing aesthetic preferences, too. As you quite rightly remark, when you're using an app every day, it's got to look good!

To deal with the overview issue: this is a problem in any and all task managers. The thing about Pagico is that even in the Timeline view, each project can be "folded", in which case all you see is the name of the project and a bar extending over the dates scheduled for any tasks within the project. This makes it remarkably easy to gain an overview of all your projects. My own preferred approach is to fold projects that aren't due immediately, and keep projects with urgent/imminent tasks open so I can see the individual tasks. This generally fits in a single screen.

But Pagico has other advantages: you can use Collections to focus on specific groups of projects, whereupon they are displayed in their own Timeline (as if they were the only projects in your Timeline). Collections are like smart folders: you define rules/criteria (based on tags, search terms etc.) for each Collection, and that's all each Collection displays. So for example I have tags such as LIVE, INVOICING, WAITING etc., and have put together Collections based on these tags, making it very easy to focus on specific sets of activities. It's worth mentioning that OmniFocus has only just (in the very latest release) gained the ability to assign multiple tags to a task! Pagico has always had it.

No, Pagico isn't perfect, but unlike Dellu, I don't find it clunky or slow at all; it used to be, a couple of years ago, which is why I didn't take to it then. The developers are nothing if not passionate, however, and the latest versions run very well. As for the aesthetics: well, I find them appealing, but they certainly won't appeal to everybody. If I was the lead developer, I would probably modify the layout of project pages a little (less intrusive text, maybe columns etc.), and I'd certainly want to be able to put rich-text notes in Tasks (you can, mind you, if you copy and paste!) - at the moment, only Notes support rich text, which is okay if you're prepared to link Notes to your Task (easily done; it's also easy to link files to any Note or Task). So yes, like all task managers, it needs further work. But as an overall project manager, it does the job for me!

Cheers,
Bill

I have to agree with this. I've been trying hard to like Pagico, but I just fail to. I gave it a try a year ago, and was discouraged by the number of serious bugs and the odd UI.
As I'm trying to move away from Merlin ( which I've been underusing as a simple Gantt task planner ) because it has unfortunately now moved from a one-time purchase/upgrade to a rather expensive yearly subscription model, I gave Pagico another try since it is included in my Setapp subscription. Alas, on top of the clunky interface, I still find it full of bugs, some of them rather unacceptable for an app that has been existing for so long. Things like adjusting the time slider in the Gannt view can have tasks suddenly shifting to the wrong place in the timeline ( a task that's labeled 3rd August find itself showing under 15th February for example ) and other rather not-so-subtle bugs...
Unfortunately the choice of Gantt-based task planners is rather limited on the Mac, at least affordable ones...




Hugh wrote:

It's seldom that I disagree with Bill's views, but this is one occasion,
at least to some extent.

Two or three months ago when Bill (I think) signalled that a significant
upgrade of Pagico was available, I updated my copies (macOS and iOS) and
devoted a lot of time and effort into putting the upgrade through its
paces. I don't regret the time and effort. The upgrade was/is a huge
improvement on what went before. But I was still unhappy with it.

I liked all the aspects of its functionality that Bill and others have
praised. In particular, I have always liked its Gantt-ish chart. But I
still felt that aspects of the application's user interface were awkward
and inelegant. There were all those eccentric combinations of upper- and
lower-case typefaces that I always found - well - ugly in the Pagico UI,
and as far I could see not amenable to modification. Such things matter
when you visit an application many times a day.

Also, there were still functions that I found it awkward or difficult to
operate or engage with, and steps that didn't quite work as one might
have expected. And little things: for example, I customarily have a long
list of projects. In Omnifocus the list can be made, just, to fit on my
screen. In Pagico, not (as far as I could see).

I don't wish to damn the application. Perhaps if collaboration was
important to me (it isn't), I might have stuck with it. I usually admire
eccentricity, and it was the combination of tasks and scheduling, then
quite eccentric though not unique, that first attracted me to Pagico in
the dim and distant past. But not now enough to stick with it, at the
moment.

Limited to zero as far as I can see. A while ago someone posted here about a new Gantt-like planner (Sheet Planner?) but that thread went silent so maybe it was too difficult to develop.

Unfortunately the choice of Gantt-based task planners is rather limited
on the Mac, at least affordable ones...

Nope, SheetPlanner is, as far as I'm aware, now in beta and making good progress. I'm looking forward to seeing the gold release!

Cheers,
Bill

Hi Paul,
We are 95% there. I had to get a new set of toolbar icons created because I decided to go with a more default look and I expect that after this coming Friday's build we will be going into beta. 1.0 is feature complete and very stable.

Just got to get the website finished and get everything in order to receive beta feedback.
It took a little longer to get here than I thought but thats mostly because of self imposed scope creep and some refinement of the features.....

Please let me know if you have any questions.
Thanks,
Peter


Paul Korm wrote:

Limited to zero as far as I can see. A while ago someone posted here
about a new Gantt-like planner (Sheet Planner?) but that thread went
silent so maybe it was too difficult to develop.

>Unfortunately the choice of Gantt-based task planners is rather limited
>on the Mac, at least affordable ones...

Hi Dr Andus.
My forthcoming application will allow you to check off your scheduled tasks right there in the calendar.
Thanks,
Peter

Dr Andus wrote:

Dellu wrote:
>The problem of calendar events is that you cannot check them off.

This is a very low-tech solution, but if the software makes it easy, you
could just add [X] in front of a completed item.

I used to do that with Google Calendar, but unfortunately the recent
redesign eliminated the easy way of doing it (the old event pop-up where
you could type directly into the event title field).

Dang! That's good news!

SheetPlanner wrote:

Hi Paul,
We are 95% there. I had to get a new set of toolbar icons created
because I decided to go with a more default look and I expect that after
this coming Friday's build we will be going into beta. 1.0 is feature
complete and very stable.

Just got to get the website finished and get everything in order to
receive beta feedback.
It took a little longer to get here than I thought but thats mostly
because of self imposed scope creep and some refinement of the
features.....

Please let me know if you have any questions.
Thanks,
Peter

Good.
We are definitely looking forward to try SheetPlanner.

I have already watched the videos in youtube.

I just learned that TickTick can schedule the tasks.

Apart from the gigantic Project management tools, and online tools discussed in this form, Ticktick seems the only to do app that unifies tasks and events.
Tasks can be checked; as well as assigned a time interval in the calendar. I find this very useful to plan my day.

Curio can sync with a task calendar and with an events calendar -- iCloud distinguishes between the two. Curio's not in the same category as TickTock or other apps in this thread, but the ability to make tasks or events from graphical figures on Curio's canvas is an interesting (and fun) feature.

Dellu wrote:

Ticktick seems the only to do app that unifies
tasks and events.
Tasks can be checked; as well as assigned a time interval in the
calendar. I find this very useful to plan my day.