Opportunity for GoodTask - Time Blocking

I think there's a huge opportunity for GoodTask with the addition of a feature - time blocking. Time blocking has become a huge topic of interest in the past few years. There are YouTube vloggers that focus on this. I've seen a single video on time blocking with a half a million views. They sometimes review software / apps but none of them really are that good. Or they have expensive subscriptions. So most people and most vloggers use Google Calendar.

They use the week view of Google Calendar and simply block out events for their week, each block representing the task they'll focus on during that time, or an actual event they need to attend. The Pros are that it's visually appealing and that your tasks and your events are on one easy to view screen. You can see where you're free time is and how you've allocated your time in one clear screen.

The Cons are that Google Calendar is a horrible for tasks. It doesn't even allow you to block out tasks with Google Tasks. There would be a great hunger for a program that could do a better job.

The opportunity would be to create a screen within GoodTask for time blocking. It wouldn't need to be tied to a specific list. You just need one screen because we just have one set of hours to work with in a week. The screen could look just like the week view in Google Calendar. It would include your Google Calendar events which could be resized to make them longer or shorter or to be dragged to a different day/time within the week. And, in that view you could add your tasks, drag them to a time/day and resize their duration just like events in Google Calendar. The advantage over Google Calendar is that you'd have tasks along side events and have the full power of GoodTasks for your tasks.

I guarantee you, if you added this feature and sent review copies of GoodTask to the many vloggers that create videos on Time Blocking that you'd get a lot of interest in GoodTasks. Like I said, there aren't really any good solutions and people use Google Calendar because it's the best there is right now. But using events as tasks really sucks.

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Hi @stevew, thanks for the suggestion.

Calendar and tasks integrated in a view is a key feature in GoodTask from the beginning. Currently it's handled as lists with visual component of calendar as you're aware of. It would be a great addition to GoodTask if it gets calendar views shown in blocks like calendar apps. It's definitely in the list to consider on future updates.

Thanks!

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Yes I cam to see if this app could do it as I like reminders on ios. I'll look to purchasing the app for ios and osx if it can be done. Please update me when complete. Hopefully u get it done before there's a pivot to the app that can.

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A fellow user, here:

Time blocking is the whole reason I downloaded GoodTask! I kept seeing comments from ADHDers saying they needed to replace the now-defunct perfect app “30/30,” and GoodTask was a common answer.

I figured out a way to sort-of time block in GoodTask, and described it in Relative time 200+? . Of course it would be nice if time blocking became a more clearly-defined feature.

Hope that helps!

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I followed that link and I don't see a description of how you use GoodTask for time blocking -- but I would love a description if you're willing to write one up! GoodTask meets most of my needs except for time blocking, which I'm currently doing in a separate calender and it just doesn't work very well. I just tried out Amazing Marvin, which makes time blocking really easy and intuitive, and lets you schedule specific tasks into your timeblocked areas, but Marvin has no iOS shortcuts integrations, no watch complications, no widgets, and I can't get it to notify me on mobile. And with ADHD, I can't have my tasks hidden with a walled garden that I have to click into to see. So I'm back to trying to get GoodTask to work somehow for timeblocking.

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Hi all,

I’ve just stumbled across this post after recently requesting exactly the same feature here:

I had no idea this was called timeblocking or even that it existed outside of my mind, so thanks for this! I will definitely get onto those YouTube vids.

I’ve actually spent a bit of time writing an iOS shortcuts integration for this exact purpose over the last few days. It works pretty well but is very idiosyncratic and clunky so I won’t share it here, but thought you might be interested to see how it works.

Basically it connects GoodTask to the native iOS calendar app, allowing them to stay synced with each other and display GoodTask tasks together with regular events in the calendar.

I have a GoodTask list called “unscheduled” which is where I create tasks as they arise in my working day. When I have a moment, I then find a time in the week view of the calendars app that is free to schedule work on these tasks. It’s great to be able to see the whole week visually this way and see at a glance when is best to work on a task.

My favourite way is to drag and drop tasks from GoodTask onto a space in the Calendars week view. The iOS shortcut then updates the Start Time and Due Date of the task in GoodTask to reflect the start and end time in Calendar. I can also change the duration of the task in Calendar and it will update in GoodTask. Conversely if I later change these times in GoodTask, the changes will update in Calendar.

Finally, once a task has been dropped from my GoodTask ‘Unscheduled’ list into the Calendars app, it will automatically be removed from the ‘Unscheduled’ list and moved into my ‘Work Schedule’ list ready to be worked on when the day comes.

I’ll see if I can post a short video of how it works here. Obviously it’s a bit clearer on the iPads big screen but here it is on my iPhone, hope it’s clear enough!

I keep getting really drawn into projects like these and then later learning that neurodivergent people already have words for them. Really interesting so thanks again :blush:

Of course it would be wonderful if GoodTask had this functionality in the native app which is already so powerful in other ways, hopefully sometime soon!

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Sorry not sure if that link works, here’s a YouTube link instead:

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adding weekly view with time blocking features would be a good additonal feature!!!!

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