I’m quite tempted to give it a whirl. I’ve saved the link for pondering when I’m back at work in Jan and feeling stressed 
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Looks interesting, thanks for posting!
Different strokes, right?
George R. R. Martin could say the same about Wordstar.
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I think I knew this about him, at one time, maybe. I never loved Wordstar but it got the job done. Just one of umpteen-million editors and Word Processors I learned over the years.
Can you share more about why you like SuperPlanner so much? I gave it a bit of a try and it seems like it’s unpolished. I mean, the data model is there, it’s using native controls and it’s neat that it publishes calendar events as live events. But it feels like you’d run into little annoyances and frictions al the time because the dialogs and interface is too unassuming and unopinionated. To geoffaire’s point, if you have an unopinionated calendar interface, you basically have the Calendar app.
This is a great example of an app that presents time blocking in an opinionated way. It’s looking good lately, too!
While Sort3d has been around for a couple of years, they “inspired” their UI in Things, while SuperPlanner looks like Apple Reminders with time blocking superpowers. I like the UI on SuperPlanner but find it lacking Reminders integration.
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The nice idea behind a task manager with time blocking is that you have a central place to check your tasks and progress. What do I do now? Should I check the next calendar item or check my todo app? Both? Nah, not gonna happen.
The main issue is that while there are apps that try to tackle this, they either fail on being too basic for tasks (for example, Fantastical) or being to weak managing calendars (for example, Butleroy). Perhaps is because the coding effort is double for both approaches and it is difficult to one developer to crack both nuts. Best one I’ve seen is Amazing Marvin, but it has a totally non-appleish user interface,
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I really liked Amazing Marvin as a product but the little niggles (lack of iOS/MacOS parity, strange layout for task management) prevented me from going all in (I was ironically also put off by the price, but then bought NotePlan, so clearly the issue wasn’t the price really ).
NotePlan has a time-blocking feature. I quite enjoy it sometimes but I’m not making the most of it. My issue is that I like to see the whole week at a glance, which NotePlan doesn’t do for time blocks. I don’t want to push the time blocks to my calendar (you can view them just inside NotePlan or sync to an external calendar, or both, or mix and match depending on the block!). So my gap is planning at a weekly level.
For daily time boxing, I’m finding Llama Life more useful and this month have taken a year’s subscription. I can’t really explain why it’s better as a daily driver, but it’s because it’s designed for when you’re “in” the day, and you can just queue up the blocks of time/tasks you need to complete, and pause them when interrupted, etc. If that makes sense? I see it more as a running timer rather than a static task list? (I’m doing a terrible job explaining why I like it!) I copy my key tasks out of NotePlan and add them to Llama Life for the day’s big blocks of work, and I can just pause them whenever I have a meeting.
It also gives you a time calculation so you know if you’ve scheduled 10 hours work for a 6 hour day - I loved this feature on Amazing Marvin as I am completely incapable of not over-committing myself, so Llama Life is worth it just for that!! I actually don’t know why other task managers with a daily view don’t build a time-tracking function, because I doubt I’m the only person who regularly schedules more work than can be physically done in the available time.
I used Sorted for awhile and it worked pretty well, but eventually went back to using Things and Apple Calendar. It turns out that I like some friction putting things on my Calendar. So each morning, I spend about 10 minutes putting in time blocks on my calendar around the meetings I have. They usually correspond to a Project in Things, so when that time block comes around, I focus in on that project and just work on those tasks for 1-2 hours, however long the time block is. I use my Calendar to say no to meetings, if someone asks me to attend a meeting at the last minute, I will look and consider if what I planned during that time is more important or not. Often it is, and I’ll say no or propose another time when I am free.
So another thing I do is I don’t sync my Calendar with my work calendar. I actually manually copy those meetings to my Apple Calendar when I’m making the time blocks. So if someone just throws a meeting on the calendar without asking me about it, I won’t see it and I won’t feel guilty that someone is trying to steal my time away.
Things is great for managing tasks, especially repeating tasks. So it makes sure that I don’t let anything fall through the cracks, but my Calendar is used for planning out my day.
I can’t justify to add another subscription to my budget.
It must be lovely to be able to ignore meetings.
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Must…. Resist… the shiny…
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I’ve basically come to a similar setup but with Reminders and Calendar. The missing piece is GoodTask, that displays both my due & daily tasks and calendar events while also allowing me to tick off as completed the calendar events. So capture is on Reminders, planning is on Calendar and the daily driver is GoodTask. I would pay almost anything if GoodTask had proper Calendar view at least on mac.
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If you’re willing to pay almost anything, NotePlan has nice integration with Calendar and Reminders and may give you what you need with tasks. 
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Well I hadn’t thought of Noteplan because my note taking needs are covered by a combination of Finder folders, Notebooks, obsidian and EagleFiler. So using Noteplan without taking notes seems like a waste of money. But hey, I’d say anything so I need to research Noteplan.
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As promised, I have considered Noteplan today --it’s holiday season after all and both my parents are with COVID, so I’m staying at home.
The UI is excellent, the task managing and timeblocking capabilities are intriguing, and the syncing options and folder structure are great, but the kill for me is that Noteplan uses the first line inside the file as the canonic reference for it everywhere, most notably in the sidebar.
I do not do much note linking, but in the sidebar I need to see the filenames: my notes and files are meticulously titled, even with YYYYMMDD format, but the first line inside the file is not a valid note title because I already did this when naming the file, so the first line inside my notes is basically random. (This also breaks another importnt workflow for me, which is listing .webloc files, because it tries to render the XML preamble in the sidebar, not the name of the webloc file).
Still, I see that this capability has been planned for more than a year so I suspect this is a very foundational NotePlan assumption, it must be hard to change. Will need to check from time to time!
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That’s too bad. I hadn’t run into that as a problem. My main use of NotePlan is the Daily Note. Most of what I enter goes into one of these dated documents. I also enter, track, and complete tasks and make use of the Calendar integration. I have a dozen or so active notes (with simple file names) in the sidebar. I move notes out to the EagleFiler app as they become inactive or archival.
Your example of a .webloc file is interesting. I would store a file like that in an everything bucket app like EagleFiler but not in my note-taking app (which expects documents with plain text or markdown formatted plain text).
@pantulis, I wonder if you were thinking that NotePlan supports as wide an array of file types as @MitchWagner claims for Obsidian:
Obsidian natively supports Markdown, plain text, audio, video, and PDFs. But it can contain any document type. I use Obsidian as a container for managing Office documents. I feel like this is a powerful benefit to Obsidian that is not discussed a lot.
It’s frustrating really how many of our daily workflows are to either get-around or avoid what is essentially poor leadership from our bosses, poor employer software choices, etc. To me your problem here is a lack of clear guidance from managers about how meetings are expected to be handled.
Until recently I worked for 2 employers. One was basically just a meeting free-for-all, where stuff would randomly arrive in your inbox with no prior information, no expectation that you could refuse a meeting and quite often no shared agenda. UGH. The other had clear expectations in place that you: a) never send a meeting request to another member of staff that they don’t know about, b) have a clear agenda that is shared before the meeting (and ideally with the meeting request), and c) have a jolly good reason for proposing that a meeting be longer than 45 mins. Guess which one was nicer to work for 
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It’s true, luckily my boss is respectful of the team’s time, but it’s a large company and you can get requests from random people in the org chart.
My current employer has what seems to me to be a sensible approach: Anybody can use the automatic scheduler to schedule a meeting, but the recipient can refuse, set an alternate time, whatever. Meetings don’t usually have agendas but they have a clear purpose.
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