Software that Schedules Your Appointments For You?

Lappie asks: "Say you've got a couple of things to do. Usually, you write them down in your diary, PDA or via some online calendaring solution. In every case YOU decide when to carry out a task based on it's priorities etc. That's not how I like to work. Having used a Psion Revo for a few years now, I got quite used to a program called Mentor which schedules my tasks for me. It may sound scary to some, but it actually works quite well. With my Psion dying on me, I'm trying to find an alternative to Mentor either as Windows, Linux , web-based or PDA based software. However, I haven't been able to find anything after several days of googling around, and I'm getting so desperate that I even considered closed source payware. To date, I can't find a comparable product in the market. Is Mentor and its capabilities a unique piece of software, or have I not looked carefully enough?"

"Based on three criteria, the program determines what tasks you have to do on a given day. The criteria are how committed you are to carrying out the task (committed / must do, fairly committed / upcoming 2-3 days, bonus), when the task should be completed (ASAP, soon / this week, sometime / this month) and how long you plan for the task to take (15m, hour, half a day or a day). Mentor knows how/where to plan tasks because for each, so called, role you play (e.g., Sysadmin, Webmaster, Home etc.) you can assign (repeating) time slots over a day. So Mentor places a task in a time slot when the duration fits the slot and when the 'urgency/priority' variables fit the distance between today and the date when a task has to be completed. Of course, Mentor automatically respects the appointments that you have, and after a quick reschedule every morning, you're all set to go for the day."

Well...

[Vaevictis666]

Why don't you stick with mentor, and from their download page [wulisoft.com] on the right column download the version for the PC EPOC emulator - I presume this will run on windows and then you're set.

If it ain't broke, don't fix it, right?

Above and Beyond

[Curmudgeonlyoldbloke]

From http://www.1soft.com/ [1soft.com]. It's designed to work in exactly the way that you describe.

Been using versions of it for many years, and can't fault it. The web site looks like a leftover from 1995, but don't hold that against them. Windows only, and doesn't run under Wine (at least not the last time I tried).

It supports tasks, projects, statuses, alarms, all that sort of stuff. Notes against items are just text files - easy to search or edit externally if you want to. Tasks can be imported or exported too if you wish.

Psions and Mooks

[fm6]

Mentor does sound interesting -- I've never heard of anything that did that kind of personal scheduling. If you can't find something similar for another platform, you might look into trying to get it running on a Symbian-based cell phone. Since Symbian is basically the current version of EPOC, that's probably easier than porting the software to PalmOS, which seems to be the author's current plans [wulisoft.com].

Or you could just get another Psion off of eBay. They'll probably be available for a long time to come.

I have to mention that overdependence on "Mook" software can lead to loss of actual identity, as described in Bruce Sterling's fiction.