SuperPlanner - new time blocking app

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 :wink:

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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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SuperPlanner definitely looks interesting. I wish there was a week view and not just a “Today” view (the blue arrow dropdown only allows you to go to a date).

I’m not sure about the $29.99/year pricing to upgrade to SuperPlanner Pro . . .

People interested in this may also want to take a look at Structured (which also does not have a week view)

Structured Pro has subscription options ($1.49/month and $7.99/year) and a lifetime plan for $29.99.

Structured has a cool graphic countdown feature showing the time remaining.

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Oh that’s interesting,. The promo images do make it look like it has a week view!

Seems like neither SuperPlanner or Structured would fill the gap I have then, planning at a weekly level. I wonder why neither app offers it. [perhaps they just think calendars suffice? But I don’t want to fill my calendar with noise!]

It displays something like a “Week view” but it only displays the events for Today, it seems. You can click on a date of the week to switch to that day but AFAIK it is not possible to display all week events at a glance.

I did a multi-week trial of Structured (I paid for 1 month). I wanted to use it for time-blocking my day. For years I’ve done this in Fantastical, but the recent price increase gave me a chance to reconsider everything. I only time-block for the current day. Blocking my whole week never worked for me.

I thought the interface was good and it seemed to be helping me time-block more effectively by adding in the appropriate gaps between blocks. Having it on Mac and iOS is a must for me, so that’s a plus.

However, it seriously fell down in displaying calendar events. Twice I had it not show calendar events. Once it was after a change to a calendar event, which I chalked up to syncing at first. But after two hours, it still didn’t show the right info. That’s a fatal error, so I stopped using it.

I still think it would be nice to have an app that would allow me to structure my day without filling up my calendar with artificial “events”. For that I need an app that works reliably on all Apple platforms, gives me alarms on iPhone and Mac (Apple watch would be even better) to keep me on track, and has a great interface.

Of course, for me the perfect solution would be for OmniFocus to integrate something like this….

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A couple of interesting things here. You mention that you only time-block for the current day, not for the week. I am exactly the other way around! Wondering what the reasons are. Is it due to the typology of work environment? In my case, I need to aggressively timeblock the week in order to defend my schedule from other random meetings! (Paraphrasing you, I need my tasks to generate those artificial “events” on my corporate Google Calendar) …or perhaps this is more a cognitive thing because I cannot manage the uncertainty of not having a clear schedule for the day past tomorrow? Curious to see other people chiming in.

That’s the sad reality with these time blocking apps, in my opinion they fall in the middle ground, either they are not great at managing tasks or they lack powerful calendar capabilities. It seems to me that mixing these two perspectives is harder than it seems.

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Thank you so much.

This is the app I have been looking for. Love it.

Happy to help! I’m still experimenting with Structured myself.

I recently talked with the dev and week view is coming. Also, the sub is not the only way to pay, there’s a lifetime purchase option; now I have no excuse to get it, being a hardcore fan of Cal Newport and Time Blocking.

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This app recently got updated adding helpful widgets, shortcuts and live activities :slight_smile: