Work Hours Dialog
The Work Hours dialog lets you control how many hours you have available for different types of
tasks. This is used by the automatic
planning to plan out when you are should work on the
different tasks.
How Available Time Works
JXCirrus Diary and JXCirrus Project work with the following
information to figure out how to make time available.
- Day Types - These define things like "Work Days", "Weekend
Days", and "Holiday Days". They are different days that have
different amounts of time available for finishing things off.
- Default Weekdays - These define which Day Type each day of the
week is normally.
- Events - These define special events, like public holidays,
which are not just Default Weekdays.
The way JXCirrus uses this information:
- Break up next next year into days.
- For each day, check the Events list, and see if one of the
Events matches the day.
- If the Event does match, then use that Day Type.
- If no Events match, then use the Default Weekday for whatever
day this is.
- Look at the Day Type, and make the time for that Day Type
available for planning tasks.
This informtion is fed back into the automatic planning to work
out when tasks can be finished.
Day Types
Day Types are listed on the left side of the dialog. Some
examples might be:
Standard Work Day
09:00 - 17:00 Work
19:00 - 21:00 Admin
Weekend
09:00 - 15:00 Outdoors
15:00 - 17:00 Admin
Holiday
08:00 - 09:00 Admin
In this examples, we had 3 time types (see available time for time types).
- Work - This might be time that you are at the office.
- Admin - This might be time that you need to pay bills or write
to your aunt.
- Outdoors - This might be time that you do the garden or paint
the house.
What this tells JXCirrus is that any tasks that have a "Work"
time type can be done between 9AM and 5PM on a standard work day.
It says that tasks with an "Admin" work type can be done between
7PM and 9PM on work days, 3PM and 5PM on weekends, and between 8AM
and 9AM if we are on holidays.
To create a new day type, use the menu Edit -> Add Day. To edit one of
the existing day types, select the entry in the day type list and
use the menu Edit
-> Edit. If you
want to delete a day type, select the entry in the list, and use
the menu Edit ->Detete. NOTE: You can
only delete a day type once it is not used for any Standard
Weekdays or Events.
When you add a new day type or edit an existing one, you will see
the Day Type dialog.
Events Tab
Events are times where you are changing your usual weekdays. Some
examples might be:
- You are on leave for 2 weeks.
- The New Years Day public holiday.
- You might be very busy at work, so you make a couple of
Saturdays into work days.
Events have 5 pieces of information:
- Start Date.
- End Date.
- Day Type.
- Applicable weekdays.
- Comment.
The functions to manage events are:
- Add a new event. Use the
button.
- Edit an existing event. Select the entry and press the
button.
- Delete an existing event. Select the event in the list, and
press the
button.
- Recalculate repeating tasks. Use
if you have repeating
tasks that depend on different work days, and you want to
recalculate the next time they occur. If you press this twice,
the recalculate does a more forceful bringing forward of
repeating tasks, and will ignore the last time you actually ran
the task.
One tricky thing that you can do is nest events within each
other. Imagine that you have 4 weeks of holidays, but you need to
go back to work for one of the days. What you can do is:
- Create a 4 week event with the Day Type set to Holidays.
- Create a 1 day event with the Day Type set to Standard Work
Day
JXCirrus always looks at the innermost event when working out how
to assign time.
Event Dialog
The main pieces of information for an Event are:
- The Start Date - You can use the ">" button at the right of
the field to select a date from a calendar.
- The End Date - You can use the ">" button at the right of
the field to select a date from a calendar. If it is a
single-day event, then the start date and end date can be the
same.
- Day Type - Select from the drop-down list.
- Applicable Days - By default, events apply to all days of the
week. You can use this feature to make entering repeating events
more easy - Imagine you switch to a 4 day week for 3 months. You
could add 14 events to turn Friday into an extra weekend day. An
easier way is to create a 3 month event with day type set to
weekend, but only have it apply to Fridays.
- Comment - This appears in the event list on the main dialog.
Week Tab
These drop-down lists let you select which Day Type each weekday
has by default.
For example, of you set Monday to Standard Work Day, then when
the system is doing planning for a Monday, it will look up the
Time Slots on the Standard Work Day.
Days Tab
This dialog shows a list of all of the different times available
in that type of day (we will call these time slots).
- The name of the day - This is the name that will be shown for
the standard weekdays as well as events. Make this as
descriptive as possible...
- The time slot list - This shows each time slot, as well as
what time type this is available to.
- The Add button
- This lets you add a new
time slot (see Time Slot Dialog below).
- The Edit button
- This lets you edit a time slot that
you have selected in the list - It will open the Time Slot
Dialog.
- The Delete button
- This lets you delete the time slot
you have selected in the list.
- The Import button
- Lets you import the time slots from
another day type.
- The Time Types button - This opens up the Time Type Dialog.
One thing to remember - You cannot have time slots that overlap.
In other words, you can't have the same bit of time allocated to
two different types of tasks.
Time Slot Dialog
This lets you edit a single time slot for a day type.
- Start Time - This is the time slot start time. Enter something
like 9:00, 17:00 or 3:30PM.
- End Time - This is the time slot end time.
- Time Type - This is the time type the slot uses.
- Comment - Just any comment you want to put in here (optional).
Time Type Dialog
This lets you add, edit or remove time types. The time types you
define here are available during the different day types on the
Work Hours Dialog. They are also available in the Time Type
selector on the Entry Edit
dialog for diary entries. Get to this dialog by
pressing the
button on the Work Hours dialog.
- Add - Lets you add another time type.
- Edit - Edits the selected time type.
- Delete - Deletes the selected time type. NOTE: You can only
delete Time Types if they aren't used anywhere (they are used in
the Work Hours dialog, and also tasks may use that time type).
Diary++ Add On
The only difference with this dialog in Diary++ is that you can
pick the resource using a drop-down list at the top left of the
Work Hours Dialog.