- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32313583

" 9 points by dchuk 3 months ago | parent | context | prev | next [–] | on: Show HN: Emery – Personal productivity workspace

I’ve tried a lot of apps like this over the years. Two main things I’ve struggled with with all of them:

1) none seem to handle multiple calendars well. I have a personal calendar, a work calendar, and a side project calendar, I want them all to be independent, have tasks blocked out on them, etc, but still be aware of each other. So for example, I want to schedule a doctor’s appointment on my personal and have my other calendars mirror that time block, but scrub the details/make it generic. Super specific idea obviously, but if I don’t have it I have so much manual overhead aligning everything that I just give up and do it by hand.

2) they are all dogshit slow (not sure about this one, haven’t tried it). The combo of electron apps and what I guess is just calendar synchronization latency makes them have surprise ux patterns and overall just shitty experience in general.

A third thing is that I really enjoy planning my life with a kanban, and executing my day from a todo list (scheduled). That’s hard to nail.

Last: my notes live separately (as most people’s do I’ve seen anecdotally).

I hope someone can really succeed in this space because time blocking is so powerful, but nothing has fit my lifestyle quite right yet unfortunately."

When I see responses like this, instinctively my internal reaction is: "Okay, so they don't have this and say they're working on improvements, but I don't know how effectively they build new features or when this might be released. Will it be a week? A month? 6 months?"

I don't know the best solution, but having some more information to answer this would keep me more engaged with products that are being actively developed. I don't want to get bought in to something that iterates at a snails pace, but I could commit myself to trying tools that rapidly iterate and improve..

Go read this book: https://www.amazon.com/Product-Roadmaps-Relaunched-Direction...

It's hands down the best approach to roadmapping out there.

The tl;dr:

Commit to Outcomes (future states of the world your product can create that don't exist today, and have meaning for your customers) without committing to solving for those Outcomes in any particular way.

So something like "It's easy for customers to get their data out of the product to feed into other applications" is an Outcome, and the Outputs can be all sorts of things: APIs, Direct Integrations to Other Apps, Excel exports, or just a dumb form for them to request the data and you have a SQL script you run to do it because it just doesn't happen enough to warrant the investment.

If you want an advisor of some sort who is a career product leader, does sales now, has an insane schedule, and is also a father of a young kid so has a crazy personal life, I’m your guy. My Twitter handle is in my profile here.

I feel exactly the same, and haven't been able to figure out how to make it work using any combination of Notion, Todoist or Trello.

Todoist with project sub-groups of "backlog", "in-progress", "blocked" and "recurring" is about the best I've managed, but I think I've just gotten too habituated to giving every task a date and managing things from the "upcoming/this week" view. Making better use of sub-tasks might help, but then you end up needing to have a kanban board within a task for managing the sub-tasks...

Well said. I pay for Trello premium solely for the scheduled checklist feature, but it’s clear that this is not a top priority for them to flesh out as you described.

I would love to find a service that combined Trello’s kanbans with Microsoft Todo and offered a tight mobile integration for reminders and widgets and the like.

  Select what General Task can access:

  - Associate you with your personal info on Google

  - See your personal info, including any personal info you've made publicly available

  - See your primary Google Account email address

  - View and edit events on all your calendars

'https://www.googleapis.com/auth/calendar.readonly', 'https://www.googleapis.com/auth/calendar.events', 'https://www.googleapis.com/auth/contacts.readonly'

This is what I use for my time blocking app project. Contacts are scheduling meeting / events which might not be needed for this project so top two is what I would use for the project

- I want this to work offline, or I will never pay for it. Many reasons:

-- No way I'm sharing my work calendar with you(your service) my dude, is actually against company(Google) policy. Many engineers at FAANG and FAANG like (big tech ) companies will love to use such tool(at least I will), they can afford it, and many of them have a strong online presence and can advertise your product for free ( the same way they do it for Obsidian, for example). So you pretty much dropping a huge chunk of your customer base.

-- User's data belong to them, many people organize their lives with this type of tool, and what they write there, is not our concern nor you should have access to it.

-- Is not too hard to implement client sync, and you can actually offer it as a premium feature.

- I know you are just starting up, but maybe you can offer a free trial without logins, so people can try your products without having to make a fake account?

- Also, a way to import calendars from Exchange, Apple, Google, ...

Congrats for the launch, it looks good. I will follow your journey, if the product change, I will buy it for sure. Love to support small hackers.

I personally would like to try it, it does touch a nerve. But I only use selfhosted services. Have been burned in the past by "free" services that went away.

---

Mentioned apps with how they handle your data:

• [General Task](https://try.generaltask.com/) – free, proprietary § ???

• [Emery](https://emery.to/) – $7/month, proprietary § Data lives on their server, when your subscription expires your account goes into read-only mode and can still view your data

• [Atomic](https://www.atomiclife.app/) – free tier, proprietary § ???

Why? How often does anyone do anything with the data they've exported from some service?

Maybe it's just me. But I feel like starting over setting up all your to-do tasks and what-not is going to take less time then writing some script to parse data from one format and upload it to some new system. Especially given that there will be a delta in featuresets.

Similar for notes and todo apps. I like to pull my data in, analyze it, visualize it, convert it to other formats, etc

Even when I don't yet have specific plans for my data I like to know I can pull it in and make local backups

But I can't see any info on pricing? I see "free to start!" but always worried about roach motel business models - esp since the TOS is soooo detailed this doesn't seem like a happy hacker side project? Am I the product, or just too cynical nowadays?

update: after reg i see:

> That means we will be keeping our personal productivity solution free forever.

so i guess that means you're banking on a 2B version later?

At large companies, it's not uncommon to have a security policy that forbids using 3rd party SaaS apps that haven't been formally blessed by IT. Getting that approval is a herculean task.

For a task manager I'll use at work, anything that's running in the cloud is essentially off limits as a result.

One thing I like about Linear is having multiple accounts/workspaces and easily switching between them. As someone who manages multiple Gmail accounts and projects, this would be a nice feature. Totally understandable why it's not in the beta, though.

What's the best way to report issues once this thread has gone stale?

Looks slick otherwise.

Any plans to extend the Github integration to Issues in addition to PRs?

Congrats on the launch, thanks for the response

And I've also found that focusing too much on small details can cause you to miss big picture work that has much more effect. For example, you optimize preparing for a meeting, but you don't stop to think "maybe I don't even need this meeting?". Or you have very detailed implementation for some feature, but you don't think about maybe a different feature would be more valuable.

I have been casually thinking of what a task management solution that encourages more spontaneous and creative work would look like.

We wanted to start by doing the fundamentals very well (tasks, basic calendar, etc), but we are very excited to push the envelope of what a task manager does over time and help align your short term actions with what can most effectively advance your goals in the long run.

Edit: it's fixed now

Please fix the back-hijack to HN though. (it's like forwarding twice for some reason)

edit: I see you're aware of it!

Edit: it's fixed now