Project Planning Guest Blog: 'Planning Your Passions' by Norman Viss

To-Do lists and New Year’s resolutions have much in common. We realize that something needs to be done, we resolve to do it (really, this time!) and we write it down. Somewhere.

You already know how this story ends, don’t you?

By January 31 you are running around muttering to yourself and to everyone who can hear you that you have so much to do and are always running behind. New Year’s resolutions are just Bah! Humbug! anyway.

You don’t find the words “planning” and “passion” in the same sentence very often. Could that be a reason our plans often fade into history with the month in which they are made?

What if you planned your passions? Or impassioned your planning?

To-Do lists and action plans should reflect the fundamental passions and drives of your life. Why do you get up in the morning? What do you live for? Love, making an important discovery, helping people with good health or relationships, raising children well, pursuing a hobby or sport  – all of these and more can be values that motivate us and inform our action plans.

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Stress-Free Wedding Planning

These are tough economic times and people are more busy then ever before. It can be quite a challenge if on top of that you need to plan a wedding. When we read on Twitter about people planning their weddings in MS Project, we decided to come to the rescue!

We rose to the challenge, turned the Internet inside out for check lists and researched wedding planning in general. The result is a series of free Wedding Planning Schedules which will make planning a wedding a piece of cake! It tells you exactly when to do what and the added links to great resources on the Internet will save you loads of time searching for extra information.

Wedding template part 1 (first 12 months)

Wedding template part 2 (last month)

Wedding template part 3 (the wedding day)

No more Bridezillas or pre-wedding separations, brides-to-be can even decide to save money and ditch the wedding planner.

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New Features: Get More Out Of Your Time Line

The last few months we have been fine tuning the time line settings and have made some changes.

The most important aspect of a good project planning tool is the flexibility of the time line. We get a lot of requests which center around personalizing the grid in Tom's Planner. Although we would like to grand all these wishes, we need to keep thinking of our user base as a whole. We can't add American vacation days when these are different from Europe or The Middle East. The same goes for weekend days, a lot of users want these grey scaled, but these are not all the same around the world. People of Jewish faith have their weekend days on Friday and Saturday, same goes for most countriesin the Middle East. In India most private enterprises have a 5 1/2-day work week instead of a 5 day work week.

You can understand that at Tom's Planner we need to keep track of all these differences and keep accommodating users from different cultures and all walks of life.

So what did we change?

1. We have made it possible to grey scale days. Not just Saturday and Sunday, but any day of the week. You also still have the option the hide specific days of the week (for example the days you don't work or closed for business).

2. You can choose which clock you prefer, the 12-hour clock or the 24-hour clock (military time). Of course this feature will only appear if you have chosen an hourly or minute time line.

12 hour clock 24 hour clock

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New Feature: Drag & Drop From The Legend

A lot of users will be happy to learn that from now on it's possible to drag & drop colors and symbols from the legend in the grid. This way you can easily create periods and add symbols to your project schedule without having to go through the right click menu.

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