Auto-Scheduler

The full story (TLDR below):

I used to use a bullet journal to keep my to-dos organised, and it worked really well for a long time, but every morning I would have to sit down and take 10-15 minutes deciding which tasks I wanted to do. Actually, every time I finished a task I'd go back to my list and look through all the tasks again, usually picking the low hanging fruit and getting the easy stuff done first. I would still procrastinate things I didn't really want to do, but then at least they would always be present.

When I discovered Motion, I loved it. This was early days, I think it was pre-corona and it was genuinely groundbreaking. It could organise my tasks for me AND put them in my calendar for me? Crazy. For a while it worked really well, but it was really expensive, and it got more expensive, and then they started focusing on project management and teams. It stopped being the app I liked and eventually I quit.

By planning the day algorithmicly, I skip 2 things: 1) The time it steals every time you decide what to do next and 2) my ability to skip the tasks i didn't want to do.

I always wished there was a good 1:1 old Motion to go back to, and eventually I started creating my own. That was more than 2 years ago, and my version turned out quite different anyway. Now i have something I use, my GF uses it too, and I recently got my very first user that i do NOT personally know!

What I ended up with is called Auto-Scheduler. You give a task a duration and a priority, plus a due date when there is one, and it reads the freebusy time in your Google Calendar, along with the events on whichever calendars you tell it to show, then puts each task in the earliest slot that actually fits, breaks the longer ones into separate sittings, and writes the result into two calendars it creates on your account. It's more complicated than that, but that's maybe another post.

It costs three euros a month or twenty euros a year, which I worked out from what one person actually costs me to serve rather than copying a per-seat price, especially since i left motion because of the price. If i'm paying for a convenience, the price should also be a conveniance and not become a burden itself.

Limits:

It is currently Google Calendar only, desktop only. Mobile App is on the way, but i want to check the resonance before i go farther.

Major milestone:

Google's OAuth verification. I submitted on the second of August and was approved on the nineteenth, and what that process actually involves is somebody at Google going through how the app handles your calendar data before it is allowed to ask a normal user for access. While testing, its just like "whatever" but if you want to go to production, you have to get past an actual person second guessing how you've built your product. But i got through!
It also turned out to be permanent in a way I did not expect, because any change to the scopes or to the consent screen now starts another external review, so the OAuth configuration has quietly become one of the least editable parts of the whole product.

Current trouble:

The surprising part has been that the marketing is much harder than the building was. Every part of writing the app had something that told me when I was wrong, a failing test or a type error or an error report arriving from production, and marketing has nothing of the kind, so I have now spent weeks on work whose only feedback is that nobody has arrived yet. :|

I submitted to the usual directories, and every piece of inbound that has produced so far has been another founder selling me their app or an agency selling me a marketing package. Everyone is just selling me their damn shovels!

If you have used Motion or Reclaim or anything in that category and ended up back on a paper list, or just thought they were overpriced maybe this app does what you need for a reasonable price.

TLDR:

About: Auto-Scheduler places your tasks into the free gaps in your Google Calendar. You set a duration and a priority, plus a due date where there is one, and long tasks get broken into separate sittings. Google Calendar only, desktop only, one-way sync with a lock action.

Better: There are alot more settings to play around with, so you can set your preferences the way you want. Buffer times, repeating tasks, bulk add tasks, time zones, notifications, etc. and all of this is available to 100% during the month long free trial. You really get to try out the whole thing, all of the features, no free or lite tier.

Cost: 3€ per month or 20€ per year. 31-day free trial, no card required.