Most of my tasks that have a due date just are expected to be done on that some point on that date. But for some, it would be be useful to add a due time in addition to the due date, because they can’t be accomplished at any time during the day, but instead need to be done around that time.
I can an optional due time work well with existing Checkvist features:
Tasks with due time wouldn’t show as Due before the time has come (e.g. on the Due page, or marked in red in checklists).
And email would be sent for the task as the given time. (And users could decide to forward that email to a third-party service to get a notification at that time, waiting for Checkvist to have a truly mobile app that could sync in the background and send users notifications.)
(The “due tasks” email sent a beginning of the day should also list those tasks, with an indication of the time when they are due.)
I would like to use repeating tasks with a time, but at least personally don’t need the repetition period to be shorter than what it is now, that is: I don’t have a need for tasks that would repeat, say, every 2 hours.
Is this a feature that could see the day in Checkvist in a near future, or would you see this as something for the long term, or even, maybe, something that wouldn’t fit well with your vision for Checkvist?
Looking into the past, we didn’t want to add due date feature into Checkvist as we considered it not fitting the project vision. But things change, so due date was added and now it is a valuable part of the product, simply because people like using Checkvist to accomplish different tasks and to avoid using multiple tools.
Speaking about time support - the situation is quite similar. Complete support of time for due dates requires quite noticeable additions to the tool (you outlined some of the points yourself), and right now, we don’t want to move into this direction. But probably, we’ll have to do it in the future, when we’ve already covered areas which are more related to the current vision (better search/filtering, team support, saved searches, better content interlinking).
At the same time, there are real pain points for customers who use Google Calendar integration - there is no official way to specify due time. We’d really want to changes this, and as a first simple step you can use this simple workaround to specify the time for tasks going to Google Calendar:
In the task text, use a phrase like at 17:00, and set the required due date (or set the repeating due). After the next syncing to the Google Calendar, the corresponding event will start at the specified time.
This is quite a limited time support, but according to feedback from some of the customers, it is better than nothing. As for the true due time support, I’ve reopened the corresponding issue in the uservoice, please vote, but I cannot promise any estimates.
Excellent, and thank you for the detailed response. I didn’t know that your calendar integration already supported times. This is fantastic news!
I’ve first tried with Google Calendar, but it seems that Google Calendar only refresh feeds “every 6-24 hours”, which to me is too infrequent to be relied upon for notifications (i.e. if I add a “reminder” for tonight, will I get the notification when the time comes?).
However, I’ve been able to add the feed directly on iOS (in the iOS Settings), where you can set a refresh rate to 15 min, which seems reasonable to me, and notifications do work great this way. This also has the added benefit of not polluting my Google Calendar, which I use as my main calendar.
Now, having native support for times, and a native app able to do background refreshes, would make this less fiddly, but I understand you have other priorities. And in the meantime, I did put my vote for time support, and, of course, for a native mobile app. (I’m sure the latter is a lot of work, but would be a huge plus, both from a practical perspective, and also for marketing. But you already know that.)
It works when entering via the interface (and it’s great), but when mailing in, a task with also the time as suggested the time syntax on the mailed item is not parsed. I guess it get parsed only when it’s at the end of the line.
However, I have noticed that checkvist will recognize even when mailing in with the format is “at XX:YY ^DATE” so the problem is somehow workaroundable.
When sending tasks to Checkvist via e-mail, it basically uses the similar syntax as when editing in the web UI.
I.e. due dates should go at the end of the line like ^tomorrow and time reference - in middle of text, before that. All this because at TIME support is really a workaround and not a real feature.
