About EDF

Planning must relieve your live, not enslave you.

EDF minimizes planning effort and gets you back free time.

EDF - Earliest Deadline First - is a dead simple planning method:

1. Sort outcomes by deadline.
2. Start working on the first outcome.

Note: we talk about outcomes, not tasks — and we want to encourage you too, to think of planning as achieving outcomes. An outcome is the desired result of a sequence of tasks.

This web application: µEDF 0.4α-ADP, implements an online EDF planner tuned for your day-to-day live.

Quickstart

1. Add outcomes and their deadline. Keep it short and clear.
2. Pick the first outcome on top of the Pending outcomes list and start working on it.
3. Once achieved, close the outcome with the finish button: ✓.
4. Repeat.

Other actions:

• You might find, that you no longer need an outcome. Close it with the cancel button: x.
• Prepend outcomes with tags for filtering. A tag is a single word prefixed with an @ character.
• Edit an outcome by clicking on its title. There is no cancel button on the edit form, just go back ← in the browser window or click on the Pending tab to leave the outcome unchanged.
• Fill the Not before date field if you cannot start working on an outcome right away. The outcome will be grayed out in the list until then.
• If somebody else needs to work on an outcome, fill out the Assigned field with their name and set the deadline to the date when they should deliver. Your job is to check on them before the deadline. Also use Not before if appropriate. Assigned outcomes show the assignee's name in blue.
• The special tags @daily, @weekly, @monthly and @yearly create recurrent outcomes. When marked as achieved they update their Deadline and Not before date instead of finalizing.
• In case you finalized an outcome to early, or if you want to reuse one, look it up in the Finalized tab and reopen it with the start button: >.
• The deadline is required for EDF to work. If you do not specify one, the outcome is parked at the bottom of the list in the No date section.

Can you deliver?

Add effort to your outcomes in order to forecast deliverabilty. Effort is the time you expect to spend on the tasks required to achieve the outcome, it is specified in minutes. µEDF assumess you can allocate a total of 7 hours per week to them.

The Total column in the Pending outcomes list shows the running total of effort for the upcoming deadlines. The Slack colum shows the running extra time you have earned for yourself.

• You're fine as long as you have slack,
• but you get warned if you run on tight schedule.
• The total number goes red when the running total exceeds your weekly capacity.

When you run out of time, act and communicate early: stop what you are doing and weigh your options, you'll have to cancel or delay outcomes and you can delegate tasks. When you got slack back, your're fine again.

If you fall behind with your commitments, the Overdue task list appears on top. It's total effort is the extra amount of time you'd need, but don't have anymore. Stay calm and proceed as in the previous paragraph. Start by resolving the first deadline first!

Outcomes List Filtering

You can filter outcomes with certain tags by selecting a tag and pressing the respective only or exclude button.

To remove a tag from the filter, select the empty     line in the respective dropdown and update by pressing the button.

Tag filters add up: @Groceriesor@Errandsonly will list both categories of outcomes.

@Groceriesand@Errandsexclude will exclude both.

Don't go wild on tags. More then five tags will most likely be counterproductive.