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, 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 Projects & Tasks Screen.
• 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 Planner Screen
• To get a list of upcoming, overdue and untimed tasks, go to the Tasks screen.
• To attain superhuman levels of productivity, go to the Work Screen.

Quickstart

1. Go to the Projects & Tasks Screen 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.
2. Select a project, then start entering tasks for that project using the New Task input box in the top center. See Smart task entry for more info on how to set deadlines, tags and more all at the same time.
3. A number of graphical elements on the Projects & Tasks Screen 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.
4. Go to the 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.
5. Go to the Tasks Screen to get a list of tasks that you should take a look at at the moment.
6. Go to the Work Screen to work according to the pomodoro technique.