A whole new way to see and arrange your schedule
Pagico presents your schedule in a whole new way. Unlike traditional calendar views, this flowchart helps you concentrate on what’s in the near future, what needs to be done, and what’s already overdue. It also provides a clearer sense of time for long-term projects, rather than “pop up in your calendar, saying that your final project is due tomorrow”, which is already too late.
Drag it around
The flowchart by default shows two-week schedule: from last week to next week, centered on “today”. However, you can drag the flowchart horizontally to see two weeks in the past and in the future.
By pressing the “dot” button, you can reset your schedule view to center on today.
The color says a lot
Different colors are used for tasks with different status. Green bars indicate the tasks are beginning today; Grey bars indicate tasks that begin in the future; Blue bars indiate tasks that are started, but not due very soon; Orange bars indicate tasks that are due soon; Red bars indicate overdue tasks.
Modifying tasks in the flowchart
To modify tasks in the flowchart, simply double-click on the bar, then you’ll see a pop-up panel with the task information in it. Modify the info, then hit “enter” or click the “Save” button to save it.
The flowchart view will be updated when you save the task. Order of the tasks may change, based on your modification.
Adding tasks in the flowchart
Because you can have multiple lists in a topic, adding tasks from the flowchart can be very tricky: the program needs to know which list you’re adding the task to. Therefore, an “append” feature is added to the flowchart, so you can append a task after an existing task. The new task will be appended to the same list.
To do so, simply hover your mouse on an existing task, and click the “+” icon. You’ll be prompted to enter the details about the tasks, such as title, due date, and start date if you have the Advanced Schedule Option turned on.
Watch the Video Tutorial!
To set up tasks (or Action Item) in a topic, you need to create a list first.
To do so, simply click the “Add…” button, and “List” in the menu.
After doing so, you’ll see an “Untitled” list is created, and you’re focusing on an list item. Go ahead and enter the task name, for example: buy milk. Then, set up the due date by clicking in the “Due Dates” input box, and selecting the date in the popup mini-calendar.
The description line is optional. Click “Save” or hit “enter” to save the task item.
You can edit the title of the list (by default is “Untitled”) to something that makes sense to you, such as “Tasks”.
There also advanced (more flexible and faster) ways of entering the dates, too.
Read More »
Creating follow-up tasks for specific contacts is very easy in Pagico. Just open up the contact profile (create one if you need), and type in the task name and due date.
After typing in the information, just hit “enter” to save it as a task.
Tasks in contact profiles doesn’t have to have a due date. But only tasks with a due date will be listed in the schedule flowchart, as well as in the "upcoming tasks" section in the sidebar.
Whenever you set up a task, by default Pagico will assign a “Start Date” for the task automatically. But some times you may need to set up the start date to some other day rather than the current day.
In order to to this, you need to turn on the “Advanced Task Management option”, by switching to the database preferences (the second preference item in the left sidebar when you’re in the preferences section), and turning on the “Enable advanced task feature for topics”.
No matter where you are in Pagico, you’ll always be able to the upcoming tasks in the sidebar.
An adjustable number of overdue and upcoming tasks will be displayed in the sidebar.
You can click on the task items to switch to the parent topic (or contact profile), or check the checkbox when the task is done, no matter where you are in the software.
To adjust the number of tasks displayed in the sidebar, please open up the preferences panel by clicking the “Preferences” icon in the tool bar, then use the drop down menu to set the number of tasks.
To see the full list of tasks in your current database, please expand the “Dashboard” group, then select the “All tasks” item in the group.
The list will include all the tasks in both topics and contact profiles.
By default, the list only shows all the tasks (finished and unfinished) in the current week, and all the un-finihsed tasks. However, you can turn on the “Show finished task?” option, to see all the finished tasks occurred before the current week.
Pagico was not designed to replace your calendar applications in any way. Instead, it works with them. You can link Pagico with your calendar application (such as iCal), so you can see schedule information stored in Pagico right in your favorite calendar application.
To do so, simply navigate to “Preferences” by clicking the button in the toolbar.
Scroll to the bottom until you see the link “Your schedule in iCal format”. Click on that, your system default calendar application will popup (if not, that probably means that you don’t have an iCal-compatible calendar app installed on your computer).
In the calendar application (in this example, iCal), you’ll be asked whether or not to subscribe to the calendar, and whether or not “remove any ToDo information from the calendar”. Choose to keep all the todo information, and set up an automatic update of every 15 minutes (or whatever you like).
Woohoo! Now you can see your schedule stored in Pagico in your favorite calendar application! Don’t forget you can also sync your calendar with your iPhone (or similar smartphone), too!
When you’re setting up dates in Pagico, a mini-calendar will popup to help you. But in addition to pick dates from the mini-calendar, you can also enter dates by typing. In fact, there are a lot of ways to enter a date, and almost all of them are faster and more powerful than picking dates from the calendar.
In order to type in the date input box, you need to use “Tab” key to navigate to that input box, rather than clicking on it (clicking on it will bring you the mini-calendar). Once the mini-calendar is there, you can’t type in the box any more.
What to type?
Pagico accepts a wide range of ways to describe a date. Here are some examples:
- “Yesterday”, “Today” or “Tomorrow”.
- “Next tuesday”, or “Last wednesday”.
- “+3 day” (three days from today) or “-1 week” (equals to “last week”)
Adding time to the date
Setting time is also easy. Just append the time info after the date, for example: “Tomorrow 10:00″ or “Today 10pm”.
Tips & Hints
Time is usually not displayed until you’re on that specific day. For example, if you write “Tomorrow 10pm”, then after saving you’ll see “Tomorrow” only. However, for tasks due on “today 10pm”, you’ll see “Today 20:00″ when saved.
Note
The feature described in this article requires Pagico 4 or higher.
Some times tasks don’t have specific deadlines, or you haven’t made up your mind yet when you were writing them in Pagico. In this case, you can make it a “Someday” task.
How to?
To do so, simply type a question mark (”?”) in the due date box in a list item.
Once you save this task item, you should be able to see in the due date column that this task is labeled as “Someday”.
Also, you’ll be able to browse all your someday tasks in the Dashboard -> All tasks view.
Note: This article covers features that are only available on Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard or later.
Preview the schedule flowchart of a database
When you have multiple databases, it will be very handy if you can preview the schedule flowchart in those databases without opening them in Pagico.
In order to do so, simply use the Finder to locate the database, *single* click on it to select the database file, then hit “space bar” on your keyboard. A QuickLook panel will pop up, displaying the schedule flowchart of that database.
To close that panel, simply click on the “X” icon of the panel, or hit “space bar” again on your keyboard.
A sample conversation note
Activities can be considered as “notes” about a person. You can take meeting notes and save that as an activity with a date of the meeting, or take notes about a conversation over phone call, etc. Basically you write down whatever information you think you might need in the future.
Please note that activities are not “tasks”. So even if you set an activity with a date in the future, it will not be listed in your schedule flowchart, nor will it be listed in the upcoming tasks section in the sidebar. If you need to set up a follow-up task, please click here.
Activities can be attached with file attachments. So email messages, PDF faxes or Word documents that you received from the person, can be saved with the activity.
