How can I schedule blocks of time to work on tasks of a particular project?

[FlippingBinary]

The schedule view is great for seeing how tasks fill up the day based on how long they are estimated to take, but it still seems to require a lot of manual work to prioritize them with tasks for different projects interleaved so that tasks from one project don't capitalize all the time.

Here are a few use-cases:

1. You want to spend an hour out of every morning chipping away at a boring, mindless project that is easy to procrastinate.
2. You've got a project that is characterized by deep-thought tasks that you want to prioritize in the afternoon during a time period that you've noticed an increased ability to concentrate.
3. You've got a personal project that would absolutely absorb every waking moment of every day, if you let it, so you want to set aside a time period to allow yourself to work on it without feeling guilty or having the willpower to tell yourself, "Okay, that's enough for today."

I'm imagining the ability to schedule recurrent blocks of time that override the autoflow to restrict which tasks can appear, how they are sorted, and whether or not to allow non-matching tasks into the void (if there is one).

Is this kind of feature available? I tried searching for it, but didn't find exactly what I was looking for.

[johannesjo]

Personally, I use repeated tasks for that use case. The feature can be found in the task detail panel, which is opened when you hover over a task and click the outer right icon.

[FlippingBinary]

I've been trying to incorporate repeated tasks into my workflow, but that seems more suited to be used for tasks that truly are repeating. I don't see a way to leverage that technique for a collection of shorter one-and-done tasks that are part of a project.

[johannesjo]

You can either:

1. Use single tasks and schedule them (with an estimate and assigned to a specific project) => single block of time blocked
2. Use repeating tasks and schedule them (with an estimate and assigned to a specific project) => recurring block of time blocked

If you also configure the notification when an estimate is exceeded, then it should give you, what you want? Or am I missing something?

[FlippingBinary]

Method 1 is the one I called "manual" because it requires that I manually schedule tasks to fit them into the time allotted for a given project without the aid of boundaries within the app. It also relies on my time estimates being accurate and short enough so the end of a task coincides with the end of the project's time period. At the end of the project time block, the method requires me to manually interrupt my current task to shuffle the remaining tasks for that project to a different day, allowing the next project's tasks to move to the top of the flow list, right? That's a lot of mental overhead in task scheduling that I would like to offload.

Method 2 loses the granularity of individual tasks and the benefits they provide. It seems about the same as marking a recurrent event on a calendar and setting the title to the name of the project, which I've tried before. I struggle with accurately estimating the time a task will take and generally have a dim awareness of things that aren't the current task, so I'd often just blow through the adjacent time block because I'm fixated on wrapping up the current item that I swear will only take just a few more minutes. Because the time block has no connection with actual tasks, I'd wind up with time blocks for projects with nothing to do on a particular day. Some of my projects have unpredictable workloads, so there are definitely days when I could delete a recurrent time block and create one assigned to a different project, but this involves an awareness of the granular tasks of each project -- something that is lost with recurrent abstract tasks being used to represent projects instead of granular tasks.

Super Productivity already has configurable work hours to fence autoflow tasks within a recurrent block of time, so what I'm suggesting would be like having multiple sets of work hours per day. Each set of work hours would have its own filter or set of filters to limit the projects/tags that tasks can source the autoflow. With multiple filters, each one could be ranked so that tasks matching the highest priority filter would autoflow first, followed by tasks that don't match the first filter but do match the second filter, and so on. A catchall filter could optionally be enabled to allow any non-matching task to fill the void, if any, or it could be disabled to allow some unstructured time.

[johannesjo]

For reference: johannesjo/super-productivity-themes#16 (comment)