Piecewise goals/tasks

[TomNaessens]

I have a personal goal of riding my bike for at least 5 hours every week. This can occur in one go, but I could also go twice for 2 hours and a half or tree times for 1 - 2 -2 hours.

More broadly, this could be expanded for all tasks that occur regularly, e.g.:

• Do the dishes | 1 hour | every week
• Learn to play the piano | 1 hour | every day
• Read a book | 5 hours | every week

It would be nice to plan these kind of tasks in Eva and let Eva divide the time herself. Maybe a "minimum" time spent should be added to (e.g.) avoid going for bike rides of 5 minutes while it takes 10 minutes to prepare.

[Procrat]

This came up a few times while discussing this with @Myrjamvdv. With your related issues #3 and #4, you seem to have noticed the same thing we had: there are two kinds of things you want to schedule here. On the one hand, you have what I'd call habits which we think of as "I want to do X for Yh every Z". On the other hand, you have -- like your issue title suggests -- goals you want to achieve over some period of time, which we think of as "I want to have done X for Yh by (deadline) Z".

The first kind is definitely something Eva should support and the question there is, similar to what I said in #3, is whether those repetitions should be fixed in time. If so, you might want to just add them to your calendar instead of letting Eva decide over them (and hopefully Eva will soon have calendar integration to make those two play nicely together).

The second kind is, in my opinion, a bit more difficult and I'm not sure what The Right Thing™ to do is there. GTD says (and I strongly support it) that your next action of any task should be clearly defined. This helps with the mental barrier of actually starting it. Implementing long-term goals and letting Eva decide how to split them up could make sense for very clearly defined goals, but when the way to a goal is unclear, Eva can't generate very specific actions to undertake. On the other hand, when goals are clear, specifying the specific actions might be mind-numbing.

For example, when you have a goal say "write a Master's thesis", you don't want Eva to just randomly split this up. Eva should rather force you to come up with the steps to accomplish this -- at the very least the very first step, like "search for and read a paper on X". As a counterexample, when you have a goal like "Read The Art of Not Giving a Fuck", you probably don't want to go through the pain of writing "read chapter 1", "read chapter 2", etc.

We should definitely come up with a good way to solve this.

[wschella]

Would it be an idea to let the user mark which kind of task is entered? Marking it as a trivial sequential ordering (read chap1, read chap2, ...) would allow Eva to split them up automagically, while marking it as a complex, for the moment unordered, combination of actions would allow Eva to force the user to enter a 'planning' or sequence of steps, and even allow Eva to account for the times this takes in the schedule.