SkedPal 3.2 — What a Journey!
It’s about 10 months since we released the first version of SkedPal 3 beta. We had a fantastic engagement from our community during this period — over 12,000 Slack messages on new ideas, suggestions, bugs, workflows, and Q&As. Thanks to the awesome active beta testers, we were able to improve the user experience, fix bugs, enhance the performance and reliability of the system and introduce new features. Of course, the list of new ideas and suggestions is much longer than what we could implement in this timeframe but everything we did was shaped by the feedback. We started with our app build no. 305 and as of this writing we’re on build no. 830. That is more than 500 web application revisions, each one with multiple bug fixes, feature enhancements, and user experience improvements. At the same time, we deployed an improved version of our server algorithms almost daily during this period.
We completed the implementation of several major new features that were on the roadmap:
- Zapier Integration — enabling SkedPal 3 to connect to hundreds of other apps.
- Asana Integration — empowering Asana users in teams to sync tasks with SkedPal 3.
- Filters & Advanced Search — a powerful tool to enhance the list management experience.
- Task Graph Dependencies — let any task in the Outline to schedule before or after any other task or event without a gap.
- Smart Tags — Set multiple task properties with just a single tag selection.
- File Attachments — Attach an unlimited number of files to tasks.
- Partial Completion of Task — Let the remainder of the work get rescheduled for later.
- Mobile Apps — Last but not least, our iOS and Android Beta apps are now available.
What’s Next
Despite all the developments and reliability of the system, SkedPal 3 is still in beta. Before we release this version, we really want to tackle a challenge in prioritization.
SkedPal 3 Outline is designed to let you organize your work based on semantic relationships. For example, you start to think of the areas, then sub-areas, projects, tasks, sub-tasks. This enables an easy-to-navigate structure using unlimited nested titles. Sections and zoom-in features also boost this list management experience.
Nevertheless, a task in one of the areas or projects down your list might actually be something that you’d like to do before another task in one of the projects higher up. In other words, the Outline does not represent the order of importance. This makes it very difficult to maintain your priority using the Outline. The Outline makes more sense if we maintain it based on semantic relationships not based on importance.
So, the question is how do we prioritize some tasks over others? So far, our natural approach has been to use urgency to prioritize tasks. In other words, when I plan a task for today, it’s more important to me than what I schedule for tomorrow. Or, what I schedule for this week is more important to me than what I plan for next week. So, the primary tool for prioritization has been the planning timeframe.
In addition, these tools assist the prioritization:
- Doing triage in the Suggestions list
- Drag & Drop in the Today & Next 7 Days lists
Nevertheless, there is a huge opportunity for improvement here. Using urgency to define importance has its own repercussions. Our natural ‘planning fallacy’ makes us want to squeeze in too many tasks as urgent. And, of course, SkedPal, being the gatekeeper won’t let us fall for it. So, we find ourselves in a battle in the Suggestions list more often than we like.
Here is how we plan to improve this. First, we definitely need a different view of our tasks that allows us to prioritize. We want to keep the Outline for organizing and the new interface will be built for prioritizing. We should be able to filter and then sort our tasks based on their importance. The key is to be able to define relative priority. Using the P1, P2, P3, .. method sounds good at first until you find yourself having too many P1s.
Secondly, and most importantly, we need to move away from using urgency and time-bound tasks as much as possible. There are basically four types of tasks that we schedule:
- Fixed-time tasks/meetings/appointments
- Routines that are made up of habits, goals, or simple chores that we’d like to do regularly.
- Time-bound tasks or projects that must be completed before a hard deadline.
- Tasks that are not really time-bound but, we’d like to get them done as soon as we can — with different priorities of course.
Depending on your job, you will have one or two of these types of tasks taking the bulk of your time. For example, an executive is primarily busy with meetings whereas someone who’s doing primarily creative work may have more flexibility in when to start and finish a task. Although everyone’s got to deliver on time we have varying degrees of flexibility on when to start and finish individual tasks.
If the majority of your scheduled tasks are the fourth type, here is the good news: Using the new feature, you will not need to assign a time-framed plan to your tasks to prioritize them. So all you have to do is to make sure that your tasks have the right relative priority. No more missed plans or deferrals. You will also be freed from the cognitive load to decide what time frame you should be giving to your tasks.
Now, the SkedPal scheduling engine will have a harder chessboard game to play. Its new mission is to first consider the priorities but at the same time ensure no time-bound tasks fall through the cracks.
Update: SkedPal 3 is now live. Visit skedpal.com
