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The Welcome Wizard is the first one to greet you when you sign-on to Skoach for the first time. It helps to set you up with: · Emailed task-reminders · Scheduled Daily Planning session · Time Categories · Weekly Template

Walk through

1. Setup Reminders and schedule your daily planning session. The daily planning session is an important part of effective time-management. At your chosen time, the daily planning wizard will walk you through a quick review of overdue tasks and prompt you to think about preparations you may need to make for upcoming projects and events.

2. Select a role. Skoach will use this information to tailor a suggested list of appropriate time-categories. You can always go back and change your role; just choose the closest fit.

3. Skoach proposes a category-list. Check the ones you want. Unchecked categories will be discarded.

4. Customize category list and build your Weekly Template. (See Weekly Template for more details.)

Google Calendar. Here’s a quick step-by step guide to sync to Google Calendar:

1. In your Skoach application, go to Plug-ins > iCal.
2. Click on iCal and copy the URL address.
3. Go to Google Calendar.
4. Find the "add" link under the "other calendars" list (on the bottom left of the Google Calendar screen).
5. Click on "add"
6. Click on "Add by URL"
7. Paste the URL you had copied into the text field.
8. Click "Add" and you are done!

• Completed
• Notes
• Checklist
• Task Name
• Date Range/ Scheduled Time
• Recurrence
• Duration
• Reminder

The Weekly Template is the basic structure of your week. Your week is divided into category time-blocks (Sleep, Exercise, Classes, Chores, Family Time...). This color-coded template is also super-imposed over your daily and weekly calendar views, giving you a broader context as you plan your day and schedule tasks and appointments. Your personal Template also guides the Auto Plan in creating a customized schedule.

Creating and Editing Categories

Before building your Weekly Template, you must first create a set of time-categories which encompass the various tasks and “sacred times” (Sleep, Family Time...) that constitute your week. If you are new to Skoach and choosing categories for the first time, we suggest letting the Welcome Wizard guide you. This wizard will suggest categories based on your responsibilities (student, parent, employed...). Click on Wizards > Welcome Wizard. For more details, see the section on Welcome Wizard.

In general, if you are just adding/deleting a few categories or changing category-settings, you will do so from the Weekly Template tab.

Adjacent to your Template is a list of your Time Categories, from where you can add, delete, and edit.

Building & Editing Your Template

Drag categories onto your week to begin building your Template.

You can then drag and stretch these blocks to add more time or to spread across multiple days.

To delete a single time block or change its category, right-click on the block. ( For Mac: CTRL-click)

Task-Specific Settings. If under preferences > notifications, you have chosen “notify about selected tasks only”, then the default setting for “Notify me” (for each task) is unchecked. You may check or uncheck “Notify me” for any individual task.

Warning. If under preferences > notifications, you chose “notify me about ALL tasks”, then you cannot unselect “Notify me” for any particular task.

The Commitment Bar gauges your workload over a selected date-range. Before adding a task, it is helpful to glance at the bar to see how much more time you have available. In this example, I have 2 hours and 24 minutes of work-time available for additional tasks.

Hint: Completed tasks do not count toward your workload.

Hint: The Commitment bar is updated every sixty seconds. The available time only includes the actual time remaining in a particular time-block. For example, imagine I have a time-block, work (9am – 5pm). If by 12pm I have not checked “complete” any of my “work” tasks, then the bar will assume that I only have 5 remaining hours to do all my work tasks for that day. To get the most accurate reading from the Commitment bar, be sure to check-off completed tasks.

Hint: The Commitment bar ALWAYS adjusts to the displayed date range and category. If you are in the Summary view, then the Commitment Bar will reflect the total workload and total available time over ALL categories. Therefore, it is often most helpful to add new tasks under the particular category-tab (instead of Summary-tab). This will insure that the Commitment Bar is giving you an accurate category-specific reading.

How Does It Work? The basic idea is pretty simple: If I have 5 hours worth of work-tasks on my Today list, and 8 hours allocated for work, then my Commitment Bar will appear about 60% full, and the gauge will say, “3 hrs available”. The algorithm is a quite a bit more sophisticated, but that’s basically what a user needs to understand in order to take advantage of this feature.

Warning. The following material may cause dizziness; do not operate heavy machinery while reading.

In fact, the challenge of gauging one’s work-load for any particular category over any given date range is not easy for people OR computers. If a task must be done on one particular day, then the calculation is pretty straight-forward, but many tasks in Skoach are set for a multi-day range (This Week, Next Week, or even a custom range like “Wed or Thurs”). In other words, I don’t know which day the task will actually be done, only that it will be done sometime during a given range of days. So if I have a 2 hour project that can be done Monday or Tuesday, which day should I subtract the time from?

Enter Quantum Mechanics. (Yes, you are still reading the Skoach Manual.) The theory of quantum mechanics is founded on the startling (but verified) idea that a particle can never be said to exist at a definite location in space. Rather, we can only calculate the probability of finding it (at a given time) at some precise location. The sum of the probabilities over all space is always one (it MUST exist somewhere).

We followed the same approach to deal with these “indeterminate” tasks. Without going into the exact mathematical detail, we basically assume that a task is more likely to be done as the due date grows closer. For each day, there is a defined probability that the particular task will be done on that day. So, if there is a 40% probability that some task will be done on Monday, and 60% that it will be done on Tuesday, we divide the duration of the task 40/60 between the two days. If on Tuesday, the same task is still marked incomplete, then the commitment bar recalculates, assigning 100% probability that the task will be done today, and deducting the full task-duration from the Commitment Bar. (The reader’s jaw is now hanging open somewhere between confusion and mild terror.)

This statistical approach does NOT work for a single task, but works beautifully on an ensemble of multiple tasks over multiple overlapping ranges of variable extent. It takes some brain-scratching, and maybe a stiff drink to wash down, but it should make sense. If not, have another drink.

Task Range - Calendar Sync

As you switch range-tabs (Today, This Week...) on the left side of your Home page, the calendar automatically shifts to display the corresponding calendar days. However, shifting your calendar to next month or next week will NOT affect the displayed task range.

Displayed Time Units

You may change the level of detail on your schedule by altering the displayed time unites (30, 15, or 10 minutes):

Print Schedule

Click on the Print icon (above the calendar) to print your schedule. Your schedule will display in a new window, from which you can customize the included information before printing.

Hint: Printed selection will include daily/ weekly schedule depending on the current daily/ weekly view.

Daily, Weekly, and Monthly views

Use icons above the calendar to change the view: