Automatic Planning

One of the key features of JXCirrus Diary and JXCirrus Project is their ability to plan out all of your jobs for the next year or two. It does this by taking all of your tasks, looking at their due dates and priorities, and fitting them in as best as it can.

What JXCirrus is trying to do is:

• Make sure everything is finished before its due date.
• Make sure the higher priority work is finished before the lower priority.

Due date trumps priority - JXCirrus thinks finishing before the due date is more important, and tries to fit in everything around that.

The end result is a down-to-the-second plan for the next year, hopefully with everything fitting in!

How to use it...

But, I hear you say... A down-to-the-second plan is just ridiculous! Who needs that? Something will happen tomorrow that will throw the whole thing into confusion.

Well, that is completely true. The down-to-the-second plan is not the point. The down to the second plan is just the way that JXCirrus answers 2 key questions.

1. Can I fit everything in?
2. What should I work on next?

That's it.

If JXCirrus only showed 2 pieces of information, those would be it! (In fact, the summary view tries to show you something along those lines).

The way JXCirrus answers these questions is to plan everything in minute detail:

1. Can I fit everything in? If our automatic plan can fit everything in, then it will happily report that nothing looks like going overdue, then the answer is "Yes". If some things look like going overdue, then you need to fix things up.
2. What should I work on next? That is easy... If I look at the detailed plan, what is the next thing coming up? Work on that!

Now for a spot of life coaching from a user manual... Here is how you could use JXCirrus to get your messy life under control.

1. Enter all of your jobs and their due dates.
2. Let JXCirrus make up its plan.
3. If any jobs have any sort of alert, then you have a problem. Go to step 5.
4. If there are no problems showing up (nothing on the tree is yellow, orange or red), the relax. Chill out. You are done. (Well, it isn't a bad idea to keep an eye on the system to see if anything goes yellow).
5. Press the button to go to the first task.
   
6. Can you tackle that task? If yes, do the task, mark it as complete, then go back to step 2.
7. If no, look at why you can't tackle the task. Maybe set its start date some time in the future when you can tackle it, or make it dependant on some other task that needs to be done first.
8. Go back to step 2.

How it Plans

Here, roughly, is how JXCirrus does it...

1. Look at your Work Hours to see how much time you have.
2. Subtract any appointments, since you can't do tasks when you are at the dentist.
3. Start fitting in the tasks, with the higher priority tasks with due dates being placed first, then the lower priority tasks with due dates, then the high priority tasks, then the low priority tasks.

When it Plans

You can tell whether JXCirrus is planning or not. Look at the symbol to the left of the date at the bottom of the main screen.

Means that the system is recalculating your plans (may take up to several minutes). During this time don't believe any of its plans.

Means that the data has changed, and the system will do a full recalculate in future (but not now so as not to make your computer permanently busy). Don't believe the plans now. If you want it to do a recalculate now, then press the button.

Means that the system has finished recalculating.

The system will update the plans whenever you:

• Complete a task.
• Set a manual plan.
• Adjust the start time, due date, duration, dependencies, repeating task info or time type for any tasks.

It also recalculates about every 5-10 minutes, even if nothing has changed.

How to see the plans

There are a few way to see what automatic plans JXCirrus has come up with.

• Look at the day view, and check the plan entries (shown with the symbol).
• Look at an individual task using the item view, and it will show you the time planned for the task.

You can also see the results of planning.

• Tasks that it is having trouble fitting in will be shown in light yellow.
• Tasks that just cannot fit into the available time will be show in orange (see alerts).

Limitations

JXCirrus cannot make up perfect plans... It tries its best, but there are some situations it just can't figure out.

• If you have a lot of tasks that are just not going to fit into the time available, it tries to shuffle them around to get them to fit.   This can take a lot of computer time, so it usually stops after 10 seconds or so.   This can end up with some tasks that could possibly be finished on time not quite fitting.