There was an app called Timeful that got acquihired by Google who promptly shut it down. What that app did that was actually good was you could have a simple todo list and you could drag it to your calendar, just like your app. They went on and on about "AI" and how they were going to blow everyone's minds at Google, but all many of us wanted was just a good old drag and drop. Timeful was only on mobile, and had an extremely simple interface. I think it just had one view, tasks on top, today's agenda below them. Another important thing was that you could kind of set aside events in your calendar, so they would show up as just a line on the left side of the agenda view, for events that don't actually tie you up, so you can still put some todo in.
I've been using reclaim.ai for time blocking and really liking it. One additional feature reclaim.ai has is "smart" 1:1s which help me to schedule recurring meetings with my team (which is super helpful with our WFH global team).
There seem to be several calendar management apps competing in this space right now, excited to see more productivity features being built from the competition.
I've seen a lot of these kinds of tools come and go, and this one looks as good if not better than most of the others. However, they're all missing out on a huge market: people in delegate or what's normally known as "Executive Assistant" roles, who are managing someone else's calendar and need a way to control what calendar items, invitations, responses, etc. their executives are seeing.
I have yet to see any tool that serves that market at all. If there was a tool that could help people in those kinds of roles, particularly if there was functionality to 'automatically' setup meetings a la Doodle (which is garbage), it would sell like hotcakes.
That doesn't sound like a huge market. Very few people have an assistant these days. That sounds like a few tens of thousands of potential customers, although admittedly ones able to afford a high premium.
I agree with the individual points of your comment, but speculate that the market could still be big enough to be profitable. This is mainly due to a popular HN thread about executive assistants from this November: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29336234
I don't think I would ever get an executive assistant, even if I were to someday be in a place to afford one. Hypothetically speaking, I get the idea that frugality can be a burden, and it sometimes makes sense to spend money to save time.
However, I personally value making the time and practicing the skill of prioritizing tasks for myself. I just generally like to be self-reliant when I have the option.
"Huge" is NaN, so I did a Google and the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics says the TAM is half a million Executive Secretaries and Executive Administrative Assistants in the United States alone.
That's an interesting space. Our current users tend to be working at earlier stage startups so we don't hear a lot about EAs but certainly for enterprise clients I could see how this would be a killer feature.
It's a very common complaint amongst EAs; there's a LOT of time management tools, but they're all geared towards an individual managing their own time.
Imagine the work you have to do to manage a busy calendar, then multiply it by 10. Then add in responsibility for booking travel, managing events, managing multiple email accounts, etc. for a number of people, and you can start to imagine how amazing it would be to have better tools to do something like managing an exec's calendar.
I speak from (limited) experience: my wife is an EA and sometimes I show her tools like this and she always asks 'can it handle delegate roles?', and every time I have to concede that, no, they don't.
Hm, just today I did something I don't normally do, which is timeblock my day! As in not just the meetings I have, but wrote down my plan for all the time in between.
Now, I haven't gotten to all of them and some things slipped. I have the luxury of that not being a huge issue. Still, it felt good knowing that whenever I thought to myself "I should be doing something" I already had one and only one thing on deck at a given time, literally.
I remember trying out Getting Things Done, really liking the idea, and then finding out I had only crappy ways to reference an email from my "todo list". Enough of my "work" is "respond to this email" that I've never been able to escape my inbox as one of my todo lists.
Any ideas on how to build task planning that lets me include link directly to an email?
We have a Gmail integration where you can star an email, and then it syncs to Taskable as a task (and links back to the original email). Once checked off, it also archives the gmail message.
That way you can star things that require follow up, and get to them later, and archive the rest.
We have a lot more to build on the email side of things - such as surfacing important emails for you, or even being able to respond quickly to emails right from Taskable so you go to your inbox less, where you can get sucked down rabbit holes very easily.
I guess that my setup is extremely tailored to my needs but it requires very little setup so here it goes.
I use Emacs Org-Mode for my todo lists and the default macOS Mail.app for email. On a Mac, Org-Mode has a tool that grabs the currently selected email and inserts a link to the message id into the Org buffer. Clicking on that link opens the message in Mail.app.
I try to clean out my email inbox every evening. I track emails that need additional work in Org-Mode and immediately move them to the email archive after I created the link.
Common problem, I think. I wrote an Outlook macro that saves the email message to a folder and puts the link to it in the clipboard, then I just paste it into Vimwiki. That way in the mail application I can archive it, delete it, whatever. Works well also for those messages you want to save for some vague reason but have no related action item right now.
In mail, select some of the text of the email, then share to reminders. This creates a reminder with the selected text and a link to the email. This also works in iOS.
Found it several years ago and used it regularly for a while. It has a nice mixed model for blending calendar, email, lists, tasks. Lots of drag and drop capability, keyboard shortcuts. Loads fast. Mobile app. Customizable views you can quickly switch between, e.g. 3 column email on left, tasks in the middle, calendar on the right.
Maybe search for Tiago Forte's "PARA" system and "one-touch inbox"; his workflows might not be precisely what you described ("task planning that lets me include link directly to an email") but I bet you'd find inspiration to facilitate your "escape". Good luck!
Google actually nailed feature this with their Tasks feature in Gmail ("Add Email to Tasks") ... but the rest of the task application is so basic and ridiculously underdeveloped that there's no point even going there.
I get anxious when I have some kind of ... time thing coming up. Meeting, have to go get a kid from school... it just sits there churning up cycles in my brain.
It's definitely not for everyone. I actually get motivation from having the deadline coming up to buckle down and try to finish the thing I am doing in the time allotted. So for me it helps with flow, but I understand that isn't universal for.
We do indeed reduce friction through the integrations, bringing your calendar together with tasks from project management tools like Jira, Shorcut, Trello, GitHub, Asana, Slack, and even email.
In terms of helping you do better estimation - we aren't addressing that directly yet with this first version. However, we do have plans to build in better insights/analytics that will help you better understand where your time is being spent, and how accurate you are with your estimations (time allotted versus time spent). We'd even love to build a feature that learns and begins to suggest expected time for certain tasks.
I've been timeblocking on paper for years with the Pomodoro method. One crucial part of that method that's easy to overlook is the part where you look back at your records when you finish a thing and see how long it took to actually make it, versus your initial estimates; doing this helps you develop a sense of how long this kind of task will actually take!
One major leap in this for me has been developing a habit of also tracking time spent on a project somewhere in the project itself; I'm an artist, and every piece I work on now has a layer called "tracking" with a bunch of little hash-marks representing a half-hour of work, with other annotations like the date and maybe what part of complex pieces I was working on. It's now really easy to look back and say "this drawing with a complicated library background took 7h".
Yeah - I find this super important too. I readjust my calendar entries based on actual time I spent on something so I can reflect on it later in the day.
As mentioned, we are going to add in insights/analytics for this reason
Ignorant question - but I assume this is not something that those of us stuck in "Enterprise IT / Big Corpo" can easily benefit from?
* I don't see Outlook/Exchange as part of Integrations (let alone more fun stuff like Lotus Notes etc :P)
* I assume it'd be essentially impossible to open ports, gain permission, pass security task list, bribe system administrators and security control officers etc for individual to integrate this into their enterprise email system
Hey Nikola - we don't yet support Outlook but it's something we are planning to do in the next couple weeks.
Indeed you are right - we've generally steered away from enterprise users because of those reasons, and instead target startups/SMEs because generally the person using our product is also an admin.
However, we do want to target enterprises eventually so at some point we'll have to figure all that out.
Sadly exactly my thought stuck in MSO 365 outlook for corporate life. And havi g multiple clients with different stakeholders and multiple projects per client is calendar hell in itself.
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There seem to be several calendar management apps competing in this space right now, excited to see more productivity features being built from the competition.
I have yet to see any tool that serves that market at all. If there was a tool that could help people in those kinds of roles, particularly if there was functionality to 'automatically' setup meetings a la Doodle (which is garbage), it would sell like hotcakes.
That doesn't sound like a huge market. Very few people have an assistant these days. That sounds like a few tens of thousands of potential customers, although admittedly ones able to afford a high premium.
I don't think I would ever get an executive assistant, even if I were to someday be in a place to afford one. Hypothetically speaking, I get the idea that frugality can be a burden, and it sometimes makes sense to spend money to save time.
However, I personally value making the time and practicing the skill of prioritizing tasks for myself. I just generally like to be self-reliant when I have the option.
"Huge" is NaN, so I did a Google and the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics says the TAM is half a million Executive Secretaries and Executive Administrative Assistants in the United States alone.
Uh, frankly, you don't know what you're talking about. Just because the people you work with don't, doesn't mean that your experience is universal.
Most execs or C-level employees are going to have at least one exec assistant, if not more.
Imagine the work you have to do to manage a busy calendar, then multiply it by 10. Then add in responsibility for booking travel, managing events, managing multiple email accounts, etc. for a number of people, and you can start to imagine how amazing it would be to have better tools to do something like managing an exec's calendar.
I speak from (limited) experience: my wife is an EA and sometimes I show her tools like this and she always asks 'can it handle delegate roles?', and every time I have to concede that, no, they don't.
I don't need _better_ ways to timeblock my day, I need _any_ way to timeblock my days that actually works...
Now, I haven't gotten to all of them and some things slipped. I have the luxury of that not being a huge issue. Still, it felt good knowing that whenever I thought to myself "I should be doing something" I already had one and only one thing on deck at a given time, literally.
Any ideas on how to build task planning that lets me include link directly to an email?
We have a Gmail integration where you can star an email, and then it syncs to Taskable as a task (and links back to the original email). Once checked off, it also archives the gmail message.
That way you can star things that require follow up, and get to them later, and archive the rest.
We have a lot more to build on the email side of things - such as surfacing important emails for you, or even being able to respond quickly to emails right from Taskable so you go to your inbox less, where you can get sucked down rabbit holes very easily.
As I'm sure you're aware, lots of us have migrated away from GMail.
I use Emacs Org-Mode for my todo lists and the default macOS Mail.app for email. On a Mac, Org-Mode has a tool that grabs the currently selected email and inserts a link to the message id into the Org buffer. Clicking on that link opens the message in Mail.app.
I try to clean out my email inbox every evening. I track emails that need additional work in Org-Mode and immediately move them to the email archive after I created the link.
In mail, select some of the text of the email, then share to reminders. This creates a reminder with the selected text and a link to the email. This also works in iOS.
Found it several years ago and used it regularly for a while. It has a nice mixed model for blending calendar, email, lists, tasks. Lots of drag and drop capability, keyboard shortcuts. Loads fast. Mobile app. Customizable views you can quickly switch between, e.g. 3 column email on left, tasks in the middle, calendar on the right.
Google, your Tasks app is cr@p ...
It's the enemy of "flow".
Anyways, timeblocking changed my life. It was a slog at first. I started off by logging what I actually did.
"Sit on couch - 12:15 - 4:30" "Walk dog - 4:30 - 4:45" "Sit on couch - 4:45 - 7:00"
Seeing the patterns I had fallen into was like looking into some sort of chronographic mirror. My fourth dimensional beer belly had gotten pretty big.
Put my ballot in the "What gets measured gets managed" box.
Does this tool address those scenarios?
I will give Taskable a try this week.
Congrats!
We do indeed reduce friction through the integrations, bringing your calendar together with tasks from project management tools like Jira, Shorcut, Trello, GitHub, Asana, Slack, and even email.
In terms of helping you do better estimation - we aren't addressing that directly yet with this first version. However, we do have plans to build in better insights/analytics that will help you better understand where your time is being spent, and how accurate you are with your estimations (time allotted versus time spent). We'd even love to build a feature that learns and begins to suggest expected time for certain tasks.
One major leap in this for me has been developing a habit of also tracking time spent on a project somewhere in the project itself; I'm an artist, and every piece I work on now has a layer called "tracking" with a bunch of little hash-marks representing a half-hour of work, with other annotations like the date and maybe what part of complex pieces I was working on. It's now really easy to look back and say "this drawing with a complicated library background took 7h".
As mentioned, we are going to add in insights/analytics for this reason
* I don't see Outlook/Exchange as part of Integrations (let alone more fun stuff like Lotus Notes etc :P)
* I assume it'd be essentially impossible to open ports, gain permission, pass security task list, bribe system administrators and security control officers etc for individual to integrate this into their enterprise email system
Indeed you are right - we've generally steered away from enterprise users because of those reasons, and instead target startups/SMEs because generally the person using our product is also an admin.
However, we do want to target enterprises eventually so at some point we'll have to figure all that out.