SkedPal

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Posted by Drewster
May 11, 2021 at 01:54 PM

I’ve been an OmniFocus user since it’s inception.

Now though, I feel like it’s not working for me as effectively. Tags seem like overhead. I seem to use it like an ala carte menu choosing the easy stuff and avoiding the difficult.

I found SkedPal v2 and now have had an opportunity to trial the beta v3.

It focuses on automatic block scheduling based on task criteria, mapping out your days/weeks.

I’m finding it interesting but challenging. I don’t know if that’s because it’s a huge departure from ingrained habits, the use of beta software, or that it’s not good/effective.

Is anybody here using it?

Posted by satis
May 11, 2021 at 05:39 PM

Looks like the return of ideas from the Timeful app from Dan Ariely, which Google purchased and folded into Google Calendar in 2015 in a somewhat diminished manner with Google Goals.

https://blog.google/products/calendar/find-time-goals-google-calendar/

Ultimately you need to decide if the SkepPal AI is useful enough to allow it to schedule things for you given your task lists. Generally speaking having tasks that can easily be scheduled into a calendar is the best way I’ve successfully found to get things done: by actually scheduling the most important things. And having other lists of things and to-dos handy so they can be scheduled is also extremely useful. So far so good.

But I haven’t seen one single combo app that offers a better calendar than a good calendar app tied to a top-tier calendering service, nor have I seen one as powerful or refined for my purposes to knock me away from my chosen task manager. Even if there was AI involved that proposes to schedule things on the calendar for me.

My current taskmanager+calendaring costs are $29/yr plus maybe $40 outright for Mac and iOS apps, and since I am pretty diligent about scheduling the important things that most need to be done I’m not sure I need additional help in that regard.

To consider SkedPal I’d personally need to be able to use scheduled items from within Google Calendar (and the apps I use to access them) rather than be required to use SkedPal’s calendaring interface. And the SkedPal website isn’t clear on the type of integration offered with Google/Office/iCloud calendars - can you made a feed that goes into those calendars, or are you stuck importing your calendars into SkedPal?

And if there is calendar integration to Google/iCloud/Office is it one-way sync to those calendars or is it 2-way sync as seen in TickTick and Todoist (for which I believe those companies pay Google a fee)? For me it’s become required to have 2-way sync so that I can view all my scheduled items from my task manager in my choice of calendar, and if I want to change something I can do it right in my calendar and have it immediately sync back to the task manager/service.

Posted by Drewster
May 12, 2021 at 12:41 AM

satis wrote:

>But I haven’t seen one single combo app that offers a better calendar
>than a good calendar app tied to a top-tier calendering service, nor
>have I seen one as powerful or refined for my purposes to knock me away
>from my chosen task manager. Even if there was AI involved that proposes
>to schedule things on the calendar for me.

To date I have relied on the OmniFocus / Fantastical combination. It’s worked, but as I mentioned, it hasn’t given me genuine focus on what to do today.

>SkedPal website isn’t clear on the type of integration offered with
>Google/Office/iCloud calendars - can you made a feed that goes into
>those calendars, or are you stuck importing your calendars into SkedPal?

The SkedPad website is quite terrible. I am hopeful that a rebuild of their website will be part of the launch of version 3. At the moment, it doesn’t do a great job building confidence in the product!

Regarding calendars, it is quite good. The ‘tasks’ that it generates on its own calendar can be subscribed to as an .ics file so this can go across to any other calendar app.

It is able to subscribe to .ics calendars from Google, iCloud and Microsoft. Unfortunately for me, as a user of Fastmail, CalDAV is not supported. This means I am having to do a double-hop of using Outlook to subscribe to my Fastmail .ics, then having SkedPal read from Outlook. Not ideal.

SkedPal respects the free/busy status of the events in the .ics files and will work around/over them as appropriate. You can also manually intervene and “sideline” a calendar event so that SkedPal ignores it.

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