AnyBots founder and CEO Trevor Blackwell (quoted in the third section of the article) is also one of the Y Combinator co-founders, and I believe both companies are in the same office building.
While I like the general idea of your 'schedule as a bar chart' solution, I see several issues:
1) There is very little space to write down appointments. I'd like to be able to write down at least a name and a location, even for a 30-minute appointment.
2) What about moved or cancelled appointments? I'm afraid things will get messy very soon.
3) How should I handle overlapping appointments?
Maybe I'm not the target audience, but I encounter these things daily.
For a back-pocket planner, I think it's nice and simple. Clearly it's not intended to incorporate all the features of a dayrunner or whatever. It's just a simple todo list + time-blocking.
1) The space is adequate if your appointments tend to be short eg Bob and Cathy or lunch and not complex like Bob, Cathy, sys-eng group rep. re: develop timeline to cost out and deploy new server cluster for foobar project (see 3/10/2010 emails "foobar server" and 3/5/2010 "how do I price a webserver?". 6th floor conference room (call in number 1-888-555-1111 p:142678)
2) The downside of any paper-based time planning is that it gets messy if you need to change things very often.
3) If you have overlapping appointments very often then I think you need to fix a more fundamental problem with your scheduling.
Unless you are some sort of genius, it seems really unlikely that you can seriously pay attention to more than one thing or person at a time. By trying to split your attention, there's a good chance you are less useful than you would be if you told one of your appointments to take a hike.
Yes, I agree it would be a nice way to do some personal time boxing ("How do I divide my free time between projects A, B and C"). But as I already noted in the parent post, this layout simply does not suit my kind of appointments.
However, I think most people in my situation would be able to use a daily version of this.
Three bars of six hours each: morning, afternoon and evening, for example. The additional height would allow me to write down overlapping appointments, and the extra width gives me room to write down some details. And in case of major messiness, I need to copy only one day to a new page.
re 1) Your example is ridiculous, but I really do need a first or last name and a location. Even for 30-minute appointments.
re 2) But there is quite a difference between changing a five into a six, or somehow moving an appointment in the bar chart.
re 3) I don't actually try to be in two places at the same time. It's usually just meetings and presentations I want even should attend, but simply overlap with other appointments. I do still want to know about them, so I can go but leave early, or drop in at a later time.
There's a lot of space around the daily timelines. For appointments I'd suggest marking it in the timeline using a letter or perhaps initials then making a note in the TODO area with the details. If the timing of the appointment would make that difficult (e.g. a 15 minute appointment, or an appointment that starts and ends at :30, putting the line for the hour division in the middle) then simply mark the appointment time appropriately and adding a note above or below the time with the letter or initials which ties in to the appointment details.
If you happen to have more than half a dozen appointments per week and have routine issues like moved, cancelled, or overlapped appointments then a simple tool like this is unlikely to meet your needs, you'd be better off with an application for a smart phone or somesuch.
It's a very nice product, and it looks a bit more presentable than your solution. This can be important when you are in a meeting or with a client (or just to yourself -- using a fancy planner motivates me to keep it neat and up-to-date).
That would also allow for a more even wear across the mattress. The center (from left to right) of our current mattress becomes soft and saggy over time, which can not be solved by anything but a quarter turn (or a new mattress).
We have tried to rotate the duvet and pillows to get the same effect, only to find The Boy's head at my feet next morning.
If you really want to rotate your mattress: IKEA used to sell round beds and mattresses. It's a bit too "Playboy Mansion" for my taste though, and it severely limits your options in sheets and duvet covers.
From left to right: Firefox (Win), Chrome (Win), Safari (Win), Safari (Mac)
Firefox renders the font way too light, Chrome (this version at least) falls back to a default font, and Safari on Windows uses incorrect kerning and renders the some characters too narrow. Only Safari on Mac renders the font acceptably (except from the heavy diagonal on the capital N and the oversized apostrophe, maybe).
Nice cycling lanes and impressive statistics, but I don't get the impression that bicycles are as ubiquitous (yet) as they are in Amsterdam.
I wonder how they handle bicycle parking in Copenhagen, because that's a real problem in most Dutch cities. Especially those cargo bikes take a lot of space.
It's a bit weird how the short description of just about every photo ends with "... on a bicycle, in Amsterdam" or some close equivalent. Either the author is just completely freaked out that all these things happen OMG ON A BICYCLE IN FREAKING AMSTERDAM, or it's some sort of attempt at SEO, hoping that Google will place this page really highly for people searching for <<<bicycle amsterdam>>>.
If it's the latter then it seems to have worked; the page is the top organic Google result for those words, at least for me at the moment. I do hope that isn't because of the clunkily repetititititive writing style.
Stealing an image from the other person replying to you it pretty much looks just like this: http://www.ski-epic.com/amsterdam_bicycles/pm3s_amsterdam_bi... in many places. Block after block with bicycles although there is room on the sidewalk for people to at least in the parts I've been in.
The most frustrating thing about Copenhagen is all the bicycle repair shops take up the business locations that should be small food places. :P
For me, the most important thing is to stick to my daily schedule. Every single day of the week.
Once I skip one or two meals, work long hours, or stay up late, my life starts spiraling out of control. So I live on a fixed schedule now, which includes three hours of exercise per day:
* One hour of swimming at 7AM; this forces me to get out of bed on time, and makes me hungry for breakfast.
* One hour of rowing at 5PM; this forces me to stop working, and makes me hungry for dinner.
* One hour of running at 11PM; this forces me to stop whatever I am doing that evening, and gets me tired for bed.
(In addition I have hundreds of small rules: never go shopping alone, the bed is only for sex and sleeping, dinner must take at least fifteen minutes to prepare, ...)
It does take a lot of time and self discipline (and monitoring by others), but it sure helps me to keep my life under control.
Most of these seem to be easy means to rather shallow ends, to me at least. Paying my sixteen-year-old nephew to do these things for me would be easier, and just as satisfying.
The only activity on this list I actually enjoyed was learning how to pick a lock. Not as a means for breaking and entering, but as a skill and an end in itself.
To me, it is all about learning to create something, preferably with a certain artistic value. Over the last few years, I have:
* Designed and built a clock (out of wood, steel and ropes).
* Designed, printed and bound a few notebooks and diaries, and two books.
* Improved my writing skills; both fiction and non-fiction. Wrote several short stories and started a working on a book.
* Bought a fountain pen, re-learned proper penmanship and developed a personal script.
* Learned how to run correctly and started running barefoot (I run 50 miles per week now).
* Borrowed my uncle's SLR camera, learned a lot about photography.
* Wrote, recorded and edited a short movie with some friends.
* Studied music theory and started playing the piano, albeit with to much ambition. I'm just not able to express myself through classical music. These days, I prefer to play blues on my guitar, or jazz standards (1930s-1940s) or stride piano when the mood is right.
Let's not reinvent the wheel and use a framework that has been developed since the seventies. Anderson's ACT-R framework is based on cognitive theories and models, and can deliver pretty accurate results.
For a more user-friendly tool, take a look at CogTool. You can build or import a prototype UI, create tasks (sets of actions: click this, type that), and let the software evaluate or automatically optimize the interface. Last time I checked they used ACT-R as the cognitive engine, so the results should be accurate.
Sure his method sounds easy, but are the results actually worth anything? It looks like an over-simplified version of ACT-R, with some made-up cost values. To me, this has no advantages over my gut feeling on usability; it's just that the numbers add some false sense of reliability.
For actual design decisions, I'd much prefer a method that has developed for thirty-some years, is based on actual cognitive models and has been empirically validated.
Besides, it's not that difficult to use. Building and testing your interface in CogTool would take you about an hour the first time, but it is easy to learn. You can even import HTML and record your actions. The results are pretty accurate, and you get automatic interface optimization (e.g. on widget size, location, types) too boot.
So, the author had a nice idea, but it has been done already. (At least for the user testing, the accurate results, the "codification" and the books; I don't know about the consulting company.)
RiderOfGiraffes lists some relevant HN items here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1562602