I’m guessing that this has been posted before, but I can’t find a reference to it …
It would be very useful to have a “Due Date” field added to Scrivener’s metadata. Virtually all my work hinges on a due date, whether it be a single article or progressive filing of chapters. I don’t imagine I’m alone here. Having a “due date” field (especially if it could be sorted on it in the outliner) would be a small but significant aid to project management.
Or it sounds small if you say it quickly.
Matt
Hi,
I will leave Keith to respond to the wish-list item, but I suspect it would be a 2.0 thing at best.
In the mean time, one possible work around for you may be to include the due date as part of the title, in yyyymmdd format so that it is sortable:
eg. 20080420 Article Name
You could then (admittedly destructively) sort the binder (perhaps there is a way to do it non-destructively, if search results can also be sorted?)
Otherwise, you might also like to consider something like Things or another task management application.
Matt
I’ve tried using Scrivener as a project management tool, but have found it very much more suitable just for writing. For my daywork as a copywriter and business communications writer, I’ve found Daylite to be the best bet for project management because it allows tracking not only of due dates, but also of calls, meetings, memos, reminders, and emails–all linked to projects and clients. I also use it for fiction writing projects-- track the same type of material–as well as other due dates like when I want to have a first draft completed, when a submission has been requested, when galley edits are due, etc. I imagine others get by just using AB and iCal, or perhaps something like Contactizer. With reminders/alarms set, everything’s aces. I guess this long-winded reply boiled down simply means that I find it more valuable to have due dates integrated in the place day-to-day organization takes place…the first and last thing I look at in a day.
Hi Keith - I’ve been thinking about a task list of some kind integrated into Scrivener. Often on a big project I use colour labels to prioritise things according to what needs to be done next, which works well; having some kind of view where one could ‘project manage’ and prioritise what should be written when would be amazing. A search brought up this thread and I reckon due dates would be a good solution.
You mentioned on another thread that Leopard’s Mail To Do’s can integrate into other apps, but I use that myself but I don’t see any way you can specify groups to be exported (I don’t need my shopping list appearing in Scriv for example) so maybe this makes it unsuitable.
So I guess the ideal functionality would have something like the tag/keyword HUD or a tab in the inspector, or possibly a new binder view specified to what writing job must come next. Views of due date, alphanumeric and user-defined order (by dragging and re-ordering) would round out the perfect integrated task manager.
Perhaps for version 3
all best,
Robin
Zengobi Curio has a lovely way of dealing with this. Pretty much any entity can have a todo property or due date assigned to it. (the basic unit in scrivener would be a err index card or whathaveyou). Curio has a fancy way of handling these within it’s own world, but a simpler way of dealing with it elsewhere. Each project has an option to publish to ical. When published a new calendar (named Curio:project_name) pops up in ical with any dates and todos available at a glance.
This works well for Curio projects as all the dates and todos are viewable at a glance within ical, and you can get an overview of several projects at once by turning calendars on and off. Curio doesn’t need to display any complex time related data, just dump it in an ical friendly format. As items with start and end dates show as bars along the top of ical one gets a good idea of deadlines and overlaps for projects etc.
I believe most of the hard bits of this are handled by the calendar suite in the Mac OS X so it may not be as hard to implement as it might first seem.
Project management of a high level does seem like it may be beyond the scope of scrivener and better served by linking to ical or providing hooks for another system (perhaps via applescript) to handle the tricky bits. Perhaps when the applescript suite is implemented someone else could tie scrivener into iCal or Things. 