obsidian-day-planner
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Feature request: allow task durations to be specified instead of start times
I do love the plugin and use it a ton. One thing that would make my life a bit easier is if I could specify durations for tasks, rather than concrete start times. There are several reasons for this:
- unplanned tasks do come in and interrupt the pre-planned flow
- planned tasks sometimes take longer (or, less frequently, shorter) to complete
- occasionally planned tasks get moved to other days or cancelled altogether (e.g. meetings get moved to later in the same day, or even to other days, people cancel stuff etc).
- I sometimes forget to plan for a task, even though I know it's coming and needs to be done, but simply forget to add it to the daily planner In all these cases, I have to re-adjust the start times for every task that follows the change. This is not only toilsome, manual task but also error prone.
So, perhaps we could have a setting for each note (or even sections within notes): is the note absolute time - based, or duration - based? If it's absolute time based, then the current behavior remains, no change. But if it's relative time (duration) - based, then:
- need to specify a start time (the current way for doing this is totally fine, e.g.
- [ ] 9:00 BEGIN
- every following entry would need to specify a duration, for example:
- [ ] 1:15 silly meeting
would mean that there's a silly meeting during the day that takes 1 hour 15 minutes. - tasks would be rendered in the order they are specified in the note
- now, if said silly meeting gets bumped out by 3 hours, I simply move the line to a later part in the note, and all other tasks would re-adjust their start and end times.
Alternatively, in place of a setting, one could also specify the format of the time specification for each task.
E.g. for tasks with set start times the current syntax would prevail: - [ ] 13:30 silly meeting
, but for relative (duration-based) entries, one would say - [ ] d0:45
, the d
prefix denoting that the following time spec is for duration. (45 minutes in this case).
I do realize that there's complexity in lining up a mix of absolute and relative times, and how to handle overlaps for example. I have some ideas for that too but I wanted to put this out there as-is for early feedback. Thanks!!!
I'd love to have this too!
Me too, duration of tasks instead of start times is much easier, I would use it a lot.
Agreed!
support!
Closing this as stale.