obsidian-day-planner icon indicating copy to clipboard operation
obsidian-day-planner copied to clipboard

Feature request: allow task durations to be specified instead of start times

Open balint-bg opened this issue 3 years ago • 4 comments

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!!!

balint-bg avatar Aug 19 '21 14:08 balint-bg

I'd love to have this too!

TheraFu avatar Sep 08 '21 22:09 TheraFu

Me too, duration of tasks instead of start times is much easier, I would use it a lot.

imeed166 avatar Sep 14 '21 21:09 imeed166

Agreed!

lilacblossom avatar Nov 28 '21 10:11 lilacblossom

support!

cynoglav avatar Dec 18 '21 10:12 cynoglav

Closing this as stale.

ivan-lednev avatar Sep 04 '23 17:09 ivan-lednev