I have an idea for a daily time scheduler aimed at technical employees but possibly useful for anyone. It really represents an enhancement to my time tracking tool that I created long ago in PHP and that I still use to this day to track work I do for clients.
In this scheme, there are days and tasks. Each day represents however many useful working hours you have in a day.
If you work an 8 hour day with an hour lunch break, that’s 7 hours.
Then you have tasks. Tasks are atomic and represent one simple thing.
If this all sounds familiar, it should.
The part that might be novel, is that the tasks all start out by default taking up an even slice of the day. If you have 5 tasks, each task is given 1/5th of the day to be completed.
A task can never have any less than 1 hour of time associated with it. If there are too many tasks, the rest will be shifted automatically to the next day.
As you work, you click on the task you want to work on. When you’re finished, you mark that task as complete. Other statuses could be used such as “ready for QA” which would spawn another task for a QA team to handle.
If you work long enough on a task that it takes up more time than was allotted, it starts shifting other tasks to the next day and the Gantt chart is automatically stretched to show the change in delivery time.
This would effectively handle communication about tasks, the time they take and the affect that has on delivery to all stakeholders.
If you find yourself with time on your hands, you can pick from the pool of tasks already created and use them to fill the rest of the time in your day. This would shift the delivery date ahead in the Gantt chart automatically.
Well, that’s my idea. I’m writing this down more for my own notes than anything.
