Personal Planner: I got tired of planning 30-minute tasks that took an hour

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Hey guys hope you are doing well,

I’m Karthik, a software engineer and Fedora user. I’ve been building Personal Planner, and I wanted to share it here.

My reason for making it is probably familiar: I’d give a task 30 minutes, spend an hour on it, then somehow make the same optimistic plan the next day.

Ticking something off felt good, but it didn’t tell me why the rest of my day had slipped.

So I built a planner where I could keep the plan, the actual time spent and a few notes about what happened together.

Here’s what you can do:

  • Put tasks on a day or week timeline, with recurring tasks and templates for regular plans.
  • Start a timer while working and compare the actual time with your estimate.
  • Review earlier days and weeks, including unfinished work and your own notes.
  • Keep ideas in an Inbox until you’re ready to schedule them.
  • Try a routine as an “Experiment,” such as learning something for 30 minutes a day, using the time you already track.

The review side is the part I care about most. If an afternoon disappeared into fixing one bug, I want to remember that when planning next week.

It’s free and open source under the MIT license. Planning, timers and reviews work offline, with data stored locally. No account or subscription is needed for local use. Optional cross-device sync uses your own Supabase project and needs setup.

It’s built with Flutter and SQLite, with downloads for Linux, Android, Windows and macOS.

Here is the link where you can try it out and let me know your thoughts about this app

Source code:

For Linux, download the x64 .tar.gz, extract it and run the included app. Windows and macOS builds are unsigned; macOS testing has been through GitHub Actions.

This is my first independently released app. If you try it on Linux, please let me know your distro.

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A quick question how you plan your day in general is it with pen and paper or using any app?Could like to know about it

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Welcome to the community @Karthik_Shabari, thanks for sharing! :handshake:

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Thank you for you warm welcome :slight_smile:

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Hey, this looks great! To answer your question, honestly I barely plan my day at all. Just wing it generally, not the best habit. :laughing: I’ll definitely give this a shot, that planned vs. actual feature seems very useful.

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I’m retired … and planning is a very “un-bounded” thing, meaning that we are at a stage where we have to “go with the flow”!

Anything major is approached with a “when the commitments of the day let me get around to it”, so it amounts to “intermittent, focused dev+testing”, with a modicum of high-level abstracted-plan of, sometimes intense, work/task breakdown!

The “intermittent” can involve “deferrals” of weeks to months.

The “sometimes intense” could amount to just a few hours, or a grouping of 3-4 hour sessions over 2-4 days.

I am aware that may not seem “intense” for some, but in the context of home life, that is what it is for me.

:slight_smile:

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Hey @Karthik_Shabari ,

Same as @Frentan and @ericmarceau . I have a kind of diary/agenda for the really important appointments but for the rest I generally wing it and I also mastered the art of deferring things until deadline, so this specific piece of software might become useful to me.

I just downloaded your app and it runs without any problem. It eats quite a chunk of RAM but it is fast and responsive and looks very good.

I’m going to test this next week or so and then see if I can be disciplined enough to keep it up for more than a few days. :sweat_smile:

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Hey,

Sure let me know once you try it out and thanks for your reply as well :wink:

With regards,
Karthik

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Great man then chill and take your time :slight_smile: and thaks for sharing your opinion as well

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Thanks for your feedback really appreciate it:) , and let me know your feedback how you feel using the app as well really looking forward to hear

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Hey @Karthik_Shabari, welcome! That title got me, because it’s literally my life with my homelab. Just last week I told myself updating an old VM image would be a quick 30 minute thing. It ended up taking the better part of a day, between dead mirrors, package conflicts and a 19 GB download. If I’d had planned vs actual tracking on that, the number would have been embarrassing lol.

To answer your question, I work nights at a hospital and go to school full time, so my shifts and class deadlines go on a calendar and pretty much everything else gets winged like Frentan said. The review side you described is what actually interests me, because I never look back at where the time went. I just make the same optimistic plan again the next day.

One question about sync: does it work with a self hosted Supabase instance, or only their cloud?

Thanks for sharing it, and congrats on your first release!

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Wow the shift you are working kind of amaze me :slight_smile: and the review is the part which was missing from my life and it had so much more control of my time.

About the sync I am not sure about it because I have only tested thoroughly in cloud I am not sure about the self host so I can’t give a defined answer here, sry for that : (

Thank you and do let me know your initial impressions of the app once you use it

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no need to apologize man, that’s a totally honest answer and I respect it way more than a guess! Supabase can be self hosted, so the self hosted setup should mostly be a matter of pointing the app at a different URL and keys. Once I get some time I can spin up a self hosted Supabase in my homelab, point Personal Planner at it, and tell you if sync works. That way you’d have a real answer for the next person who asks.

And yeah, the night shift life keeps things interesting lol.

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That’s some new info, sure let me know how that works that could be an interesting case which I haven’t considered. Btw take care of your health while working 2 shifts :slight_smile:

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