Last updated January 3rd, 2013.
The documentation is being rewritten and admittedly some of it out of date, but you can find it here: http://www.watership-planner.com/docs/
There is an explanation on how the focus cycle works here: http://www.watership-planner.com/how-to-improve-your-concentration.html
And an explanation on automatic scheduling here: http://www.watership-planner.com/product-info/how-automatic-scheduling-works.html
And new documentation for project planning and ROI prioritization here: http://www.watership-planner.com/help/planning-your-projects-overview.html
If you have any questions on how anything works, wed be happy to answer your questions via E-mail at support@watership-planner.com or use the form at the bottom of this page.
No, you can only import and export appointments right now. Importing and exporting tasks to Outlook is planned, but with no dates yet.
A task can be either:
An appointment with a specific date and time,
Or a todo that may or may not have an estimated duration.
When a task that has a tracked time associated with it gets its date changed, it makes a copy of the task on the new date so that you can still access the old task with tracked times on the date the tracked time belongs to. Due to technical reasons a task can only be associated with single date. Lifting this requirement is planned.
Tasks are designed to be a single action that can be easily accomplished within a day, usually around 20 to 30 minutes, with a practical maximum of around an hour.
Use the installer and when it asks for the location of where you want to install it, navigate to your USB thumb drive and install it there.
If you already have an installation that you want to move from a local computer to a USB thumb drive, then you can move both the installation directory and the storage directory to the same folder on the USB thumb drive, so that stronghold.db is in the same folder as Watership Planner.exe.
The default location of the storage directory for Watership Planner is:
On Windows XP: C:\Documents and Settings\
On Windows Vista & Windows 7: C:\users\
A quick way of getting here on either system is to click the Start button, then Run. From here enter %AppData% without quotes and then push OK. That will bring you to the application data folder, from there double click on the Watership Planner folder.
The database is named stronghold.db and located in the storage directory.
The default location of the storage directory for Watership Planner is:
On Windows XP: C:\Documents and Settings\
On Windows Vista & Windows 7: C:\users\
A quick way of getting here on either system is to click the Start button, then Run. From here enter %AppData% without quotes and then push OK. That will bring you to the application data folder, from there double click on the Watership Planner folder.
No, the statistics make their best guess based on what is available in the following order:
1. If there is a tracked time associated with a todo or appointment, it will always calculate effort based on the tracked times.
2. If there are no tracked times, but the todo or appointment has been marked as completed, then it will assume that the duration set as the estimate was how much effort was spent. Appointments always have an estimate; it is the length of the appointment.
There is no way of doing this right now, but it is planned.
No, a Mac version is not planned.
Appointments can be synced to Outlook and from there, most phones will grab appointments from Outlook.
Send an E-mail to support@watership-planner.com with your name and your best guess as to when you purchased a key. We will resend you the key you originally bought and you then qualify for upgrades using an upgrade key.
The automatic scheduler begins with the optimal plan, which is laying down the tasks one after the one in priority order, working around appointments.
If a task is set as “splittable” then it will take whatever gaps it can find and fill itself. If it can’t find any gaps, or not enough gaps, it will schedule itself after the next task as a normal “unsplittable” task would.
The automatic scheduler will skip any task that doesn’t have its status set to: unfinished. So it naturally doesn’t schedule: canceled, waiting, finished, or delegated tasks.
Things begin to get interesting when you have schedule constraints. There are “schedule before” constraints, and “schedule after” constraints. A deadline can be treated as a schedule before constraint.
Tasks with schedule after constraints will try to go after that time, but not necessarily immediately at that time. The automatic scheduler will hold a task with a “schedule after” constraint, and notice when it lays down a task that ends after the constraint time. Then it will lay this other task down.
Tasks with schedule before constraints will be scheduled as normal if this doesn’t schedule them after the “schedule before” constraint. If the way things are going would trigger this schedule before constraint, then it tries to fit it in before the task above it. It will keep trying this until it finds a spot that doesn’t break the constraint.
If it can’t find a spot, it will give you an alarm, and schedule it as soon as it can.
Now what happens if using the above steps it ends up with multiple tasks having their constraints broken? Then it begins to try some different strategies that produce good schedules for a certain cases and goes with schedule that it evaluates as the best, like a tournamet.
When comparing two agendas, it looks at the first task that is in conflict, and compares those priorities. If they are different, then it picks the one where the broken constraints begin on a lower priority task than the other one. This means there are situations where it would rather schedule a B1 task first to avoid breaking that “schedule before” constraint, even if it means breaking B2’s and B3’s “schedule before” constraints.
If both agendas break the constraint on the same task, then it picks the one that has the earlier end time for the “schedule before” tasks. Usually this means that they will be one right after the other, in priority order.
These rules were designed to be simple to understand so that you could easily reason about it. We would rather the scheduler be straight forward and predictable, than smart and mysterious. We have all used Word to type something like: “If I may…” and then the autocomplete kicks in with “May 24st, 2013.” We don’t want that.
This means that it when there are broken constraints, it doesn’t always pick the best agenda from your point of view. For example, your B1 task could be long and having it go first could force 4 other tasks to break their constraint. You might decide that though the B1 is more important when judged against each of the other 4 tasks, that the B1 task alone doesn’t justify breaking the constraints of the 4 other tasks. But the automatic scheduler doesn’t know how these measure up to each other when combined.
Basically the attitude of the automatic scheduler is: “If I get into a situation where I can’t make the agenda fit without breaking constraints, I will alert you of each broken constraint and I will leave the schedule in my best attempt to make it all fit.”
Usually this happens when you have too many constraints, and you begin not having enough to physically make all the constraints work.
The constraints breaking will bring up an alarm that will interrupt you. This is a last resort for the automatic scheduler that tries to get out of your way, unless it can’t make something fit. After dismissing this alarm, it won’t come up again unless you restart the application or change the schedule. It waits a minute after your changes before letting you know again, so that it doesn’t annoy you repeatedly if you are changing more than a couple fo things.
However the schedule before constraint will still be displayed in the Notifications Pane on the Day Tab, and an icon will display in task’s estimate in the Schedule View that the constraint is at risk of being broken or already broken using the current schedule.