TOPIC: Recording time used for an action, estimating time

There are two things to do with estimating time that come up in my work all the time, are probably very common for others too, and as far as I know not supported by TR at all (probably because they don't come up in GTD at all, as far as I know).

Firstly, I want to estimate how long a single action is going to take for me to do. Right now my estimations are pretty bad. I would like to record an estimate with each action, and when it is finished also record the actual time it took me. Then it would be nice to get some sort of overview of time estimated/used on actions in the last days/weeks/months in order to improve my estimations.

Secondly, people ask me when I expect a given task to be completed (or, relatedly, whether I have time to do something next week). This depends not only on the time the task will take, but also on the order in which I'm going to do tasks, the estimates for all the tasks I will do first, and the time available. Right now there is no way to do any sort of planning for tasks (this first, then that, then that) and it seems to run a bit opposite to what GTD does (look what you can do right there, pick something, do it).

So I'd like some sort of overview screen in which I can move all my ASAP actions around (they're listed in the other in which I'm planning to do them and I can move them up and down), see their estimated times, and have it shown in the list which of those actions would be done on which day if these estimates and plans all turned out to be true.

Is something a little bit like this possible with TR and am I just overlooking it? Is it on the radar for the future? Does anybody have any suggestions for alternative software I might want to use for just this part of my planning process?

It sounds like you are in pretty deep overwhelm.

Without knowing more I can't give any advice on how to attack the problem, but I don't think arranging your tasks is going to do the job.

What kind of work do you do, and what do you want out of life if you gain more control over it?

Malcolm

It's not that much overwhelm. I just wish I could do everything in TR :-)

We do contract research (the group I'm in does computer vision and near infrared spectroscopy for food and agriculture industries). For me that mostly means programming and writing documents within projects.

I usually contribute to +- 4 different projects at the same time, sometimes for small (say a few days' work) and sometimes for larger parts (months of work spread out over a year). It's up to me to make sure that I divide my time over each project in such a way that I stay within budget everywhere as much as possible and that important deadlines are met. Usually that is quite easy, but some months...

Now TR works wonderfully for me to keep track of all the actions I need to do for everything, any email that needs any action is processed in TR and I use it to keep track of everything.

Except for the planning part. And I feel that something simple like a form where I can fill in a number of available hours per day, and a list of actions that eat up a number of hours and that I can put in any order would help a lot already. I don't know if TR is the place for it (it's not GTD at all), but otherwise I have duplicate lists of actions.

Check out David Seah's "The Printable CEO"
davidseah.com/2005/11/the-printable-ceo-series/

That and "The 4 hour workweek"