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."

Manna

[hab136]

See also Manna [marshallbrain.com], a story about such software, and its logical extrapolation.

Re:Is not this scheduling problem NP-complete???

[chjones]

Actually, it's not NP, it's most certainly polynomial. Turns out that this "scheduling problem" can be arranged into a matroid [wolfram.com], and therefore a simple greedy algorithm [wolfram.com] will work. Basically, this will *always* just end up with the next "highest priority" item that fits into the current time slot.

(For a final note, I'm not in any way affiliated with mathworld.wolfram.com, but it is a useful reference.) ;-)

my own project

[brw12]

on the subject, i've been working on my own php/mysql app, "prioritexter", which is basically a glorified todo list, that sorts items by a combination of priority you set and proximity to their due date. I needed it because I keep dozens of items on my todo list at one time, and need them all to come up frequently so that I don't forget them, but don't want to have to look over my whole list every day.

A demo is at http://www.mekhaye.net/webdev/prioritexter [mekhaye.net] and a .zip of the program (view README after unzip, no install necessary) is at http://www.mekhaye.net/webdev/prioritexter.zip [mekhaye.net]. I made it for *nix with php/mysql but I imagine other platforms would handle it ok.

It should be considered gamma, or delta, or something short of beta. please give me feedback.