Wishlist for using dates

I’ve seen various posts related to dates, and in my opinion, Dynalist’s handling of dates is its weakest point. May I suggest the following refinements? (I’ve mentioned some privately, but this collects them all, I think):

  1. Sort by date
  2. More flexibility in display: personally, I’d like to see Today, Yesterday, and Tomorrow; and dates for everything else
  3. But if I have to define my own date and time format, why can’t I make the time optional? In what world is having 00:00 slapped onto 80% of the dates in a list helpful? But when you need the time, you need to show the time, so you can’t sacrifice the 80% useless displays if it also means not showing the 20% you absolutely must have.
  4. In order to create a better sync with a calendar app, there should be an option for the duration of an event, either by identifying how long an event lasts or by entering a new time for the end point. My preference is for the first because I find time zones much more of a problem than a help, and anyone who travels knows that flights, for instance, often start and end in different time zones. I’m personally more interested in how long the flight is than the time I land.
  5. Dreaming big, a calendar view and an easier way to enter an appointment directly into Dynalist. I understand that an outlining program is not a calendaring program, but outlining is such a valuable way of unifying priorities, ideas, appointments, goals, and tasks and showing the common threads that collect them all that a calendaring function would help reinforce this synergy. On the one hand, Dynalist helps you collect the meetings and other things you need to do to accomplish your goals for the month; but if you can’t quickly see your commitments for some specific day, you can’t easily make an appointment.

Let me make that last point more concrete. I’m moving to Thailand and using Dynalist to organize everything. I have uploaded forms that need to be filled out, added links to information I need, created lists of things I need to do and dates by which they need to be done organized by what purpose they serve, recorded contact information for realtors and attorneys, kept detailed itineraries for exploratory trips, and so on. So I know that on my next trip, on Day 2, I’m going to see my realtor at 2pm (complete with an internal link to her address and an embedded map). It’s all right there in Dynalist!

But if my attorney asks if I can make an appointment on Day 3, even though all my information is in Dynalist, I have everything ordered by concept, by purpose. I can’t see the agenda for the day in question quickly, so I have to go to Google Calendar to see if I’m free. Then I make the appointment, write it down temporarily somewhere, and then re-enter it into Dynalist in the appropriate category. Once it’s there, bookmarks make it easy to see an agenda already entered, but it’s not easy to use Dynalist to plan things involving dates.

Thanks for listening.

3 Likes

I think you’ve summarised very well all the tiny details which are making the use of dates/time a little bit problematic on Dynalist.

And I completely agree with you.