Manual Planning

NOTE: Manual Planning is only available with the Diary+ or Diary++ add ons.

JXCirrus Diary can do a pretty good job of planning (if you give them good information). There are times when you just don't want to go with the plan that it makes for you. JXCirrus lets you set your own times that you want to work on a task.

These plans that you make stay fixed - A bit like an appointment where you are working on a task. A long task can be broken down into as many shorter plans as you like.

There are 2 ways you can create manual plans:

Locking an Automatic Plan

This is probably the simplest way to lock down plans. If you like the plans that the computer make for you, you can lock them in place for just one task, or for the morning, or the whole day.

It may seem a tiny bit pointless to lock down the plans from the automatic planning, but there are a couple of good reasons to do this:

Locking a single planned time is done like this:

  1. Go to the Day View.
  2. Look at the time slots planned by the automatic planning - They have the Planned Time symbol. Pick the one you want to lock.
  3. Use the Lock Session button.
  4. The time slot you picked should now change to Planned Time which is the planned time symbol.

The system will now warn you if you reach that plan and haven't already started work on that task (using a session).

If you want to lock a group of plans, hold down the Ctrl key (or Command on Mac) while you are clicking on the plans in the list - That lets you select a whole lot at once. Then use the same menu to lock them all at once.

There are 4 other options for locking automatic plans (available from the Planning menu, which you can get to by pressing the PlanMenu button).

Setting a Time for a Plan

The other main way to set a manual plan is to use Plan button. This lets you manually select a time to work on a task.

When you select a task, and then use this function, a dialog will open for you:

Using the Fields

Lets say you have a 30 minute task, and you want to start at 10am...

  1. Type "10am" into the Start field.
  2. You will notice that the End field gets set automatically to 10:30 and the duration field is 0:30... That is because the system knows that it is a 30 minute task, and it assumes you want to plan for the whole task.
  3. If you only want to plan 15 minutes, go to the End field and type "10:15".
  4. Now press "OK".
  5. The dialog will now pop back up! This is because the system assumes that you want to plan the whole task, so it will keep on going until you have 30 minutes of plans set up (15 to go for you).
  6. If you didn't want to plan any more for that task, just press Cancel.
  7. But lets imagine you do want to plan the rest at 11AM.
  8. Type "11am" into the Start field.
  9. The End field should get filled to 11:15 and the duration 0:15 - That is because you already planned 15 minutes at 10AM, and it realises that you only need to plan the rest of the task.

Using the List

The planning dialog has a list of suggested times on the left side of the dialog. This list contains any time slots that are:

All you need to do is pick an entry in the list, and your plan will use that time slot. If the time slot is too short, the dialog will pop back up and give you a chance to pick another slot (just to finish off the task).

That is what the "Automatic" button does - It means, if you pop up again, just pick the first available slot in the list and don't bother me again.

There is also the "Ignore Work Hours" checkbox - Use this if you don't want to restrict yourself to working on the task just during the time type for that task. This gives you 24 hours a day (minus other plans and appointments).

Moving Plans

Once you have planned your tasks, you might want to shuffle the plans. You have 2 options here...

These options only work in the day view - They just move a plan either up or down through the day view, swapping with other plans as they go.

NOTE: Moving plans has a couple of tricks you might need to know about:

Viewing Plans

There are several ways to see the plans you have made:

Mixing with Automatic Planning

When the system carries out automatic planning, it treats manual plans in the same way as appointments... It will not put any automatic plans overlapping plans that you have set.

Clearing Plans

There are a few ways to get rid of manual plans: