LurchCal1 is a tool which should help to improve personal efficiency2.
As a long time user of ZIM for taking notes and managing tasks, there was always one challenge: As there are also a significant amount of meetings, keeping some non-meeting time available for working on the tasks can be challenging.
One way to handle that is to create appointments in the calendar just for tasks3. Doing that manually is not feasible, so automation is needed.
This is where this tool comes into play. The workflow with this tool is as follows:
- user
- enriches tasks in ZIM with meta information like duration, e.g. a task with the text "do something 30m" will take 30min (probably).
- tool
- build an internal scheduling calendar with my available working time
- get all appointments from my calendar and remove them from the available working time, thus creating a digital twin calendar.
- add some default appointments (e.g. lunch break) - or not.
- now the internal calendar contains only time left which is available for working on tasks.
- schedule all tasks with a given duration as appointments. Tasks with no duration specified will take a default amount of time (e.g. 6min). Tasks longer than an hour will be split into subtasks of max. one hour length.
- schedule according to priority and tags (e.g. ILM (Ivy Lee Method) tasks should be handled first, because they should be done today, then legal task, and so on)
- see what can't get scheduled and drops out.
The resulting schedule can then be presented as a ZIM page or additionally as appointments in Outlook, so that they block time for work instead for meetings. As a bonus, it works without cloud.
This tool is currently in prealpha and a work in progress. It lacks tests and documentation.
#TBD
- ZIM for the tasks
- a calendar, currently only Outlook is supported
- Python 3.11
- this tool
- install Python 3.11.7, e.g. in a conda environment
- install requirements
- start LurchCalApp.py
- Communication with Outlook is done via MAPI.