Overview & Quickstart
=====================

Important concepts
------------------
A **project** is a concrete goal with generally clearly defined success criteria, such as for example "Book review of Ubik for the book club blog". When the book review has been submitted to the book club blog, the project has been completed.

Each project consists of a number of **tasks**, each of which is a clearly defined unit of work, such as for example "Read Ubik again", "Draft high-level structure of book review" or "Write up the first draft".

A **work unit**, or `pomodoro <http://www.pomodorotechnique.com/>`_, is a 25
minute block of 100% focused work time, usually followed by 5 minutes of 100%
break time. The TimeRank software will help you to keep track of your work
units, optionally assigning each of these to the relevant task, or only
project. Doing this will help you to keep focused, and will also enable you to
do fine-grained analyses of the time you spend on various tasks.

One can see these three concepts as a hierarchy: At the highest level the
projects, each project containing a number of tasks and finally each task
containing a number of work units. Projects and tasks have to be defined
*before* you start working on them, a work unit is only named after it has been
completed.

User interface overview
-----------------------
The user interface consists of a four main screens:
 * To add, edit and delete projects and tasks, or to get an overview of your
   whole work life, use the :doc:`projects_tasks`.
 * To see and interact with your tasks in a calendar view, and to have TimeRank
   calculate a suitable schedule for all your tasks, go to the :doc:`Planner
   Screen <planner>`
 * To get a list of upcoming, overdue and untimed tasks, go to the :doc:`Tasks screen <tasks>`.
 * To attain superhuman levels of productivity, go to the :doc:`Work Screen
   <work>`.

Quickstart
----------
 #. Go to the :doc:`projects_tasks` and start entering projects by typing each
    project's name followed by the enter key into the New Project & Filtering
    input box at the top left. 
 #. Select a project, then start entering tasks for that project using the New
    Task input box in the top center. See :ref:`smart-task-entry` for more info
    on how to set deadlines, tags and more all at the same time.
 #. A number of graphical elements on the :doc:`projects_tasks` help to give you
    an overview of projects with tasks that are soon due or overdue, projects
    that have not had attention for a longer time, and so forth.
 #. Go to the :doc:`planner` to see your tasks and deadlines in the context of
    a calendar, and to get TimeRank to suggest a planning whereby you should
    get everything done on time. 
 #. Go to the :doc:`tasks` to get a list of tasks that you should take a look at
    at the moment.
 #. Go to the :doc:`work` to work according to the pomodoro technique.