New Feature: Curate Your Day

Your schedule is ideally your north star throughout the day. It’s the anchor that holds you to your intentions while you run your day and fight distractions. There isn’t much debate about that. But an outdated schedule can be as bad as — or even worse than — not having a schedule. If you know your current intentions are not aligned with what you had previously planned for the day, you are likely to fall victim to distractions. In other words, your mind will tend to go numb to the whole planning business. The more you find yourself misaligned with your plans, the more you’ll be demotivated to care about your plans. And, that’s why it’s important to keep your schedule fresh and up to date.

At SkedPal, we have been working hard to eliminate snags in updating your schedule. While the current automagical ‘Update Schedule’ button has contributed significantly to our mission, we noticed there is still a lurking villain. Basically, planning can be a double-edged sword. When you set your intended time frame to complete a project too short or set the estimated effort too small, you’re only being human. This is human nature and it’s called the planning fallacy. The negative impact of planning fallacy is that we need to constantly adjust our plans and reprioritize our tasks.

While SkedPal offers automated rescheduling within the intended time frames, it has never been autonomous, overriding your decisions in setting the time frames. It only reschedules a task within the set time frame (Fuzzy Planning.) And, if you miss your time frame, or if it can’t fit a task into your schedule, it adds it to the hot list. And, leaves it to you to decide how to handle it. This responsibility can turn into a lot of grooming at times, not to mention the cognitive load of the decisions. For some people, leaving a task in the hot list is the preferred choice until they end up with too many of them. This is when they go numb to the hot list and to the freshness of their plans.

We are now excited to announce a feature that we’re hoping to change this situation. With this new feature, you’ll be empowered with a more intelligent assistant to resolve the hot items on the spot. In this new version of SkedPal, we have also addressed another opportunity for improvement in prioritizing your tasks. Now, you’ll be able to re-order your list in the ‘Today’ list and let SkedPal assist you with a reality check. In addition, you’ll be able to triage your calendar to optimize for high productivity.

So, without further ado, I’d like to invite you to watch a video presentation of the new feature: Curate Your Day:

This feature is currently available in Beta. Please download the latest version of the mobile apps from the App Store or Google Play to access this feature.