꩜ Nautilus for Roam

Nautilus is a Roam Research extension for stress-free task planning/tracking, visually representing tasks and calendar events in the Roam Daily Page, and recognizing task duration variabilities. This flexible tool uses the present moment as a threshold to dynamically push unfinished tasks into the available time until tonight while keeping them in a user-defined order with user-estimated durations (no AI!).

This visual approach reduces the feeling of being overwhelmed, enhances task-effort estimating skills, and clearly shows what the feasible tasks are for the rest of the day. The spiral shape mirrors one's diminishing energy for creative tasks over a given day.

Events are yellow, tasks are blue – and done tasks are light gray

Quick Start Guide

Do once

• install Nautilus and TODO Trigger extension
• set your custom settings in the Settings section

Do on daily basis

• insert the component at the top of your Daily Page using ;;Nautilus template
• indent all events and tasks that you want to accomplish below the component as its children
• start inserting tasks, then folow up with events
• use e.g. "12:30-14:20" or "9am to 1:45pm" to anchor fixed time events
• use e.g. "10m" or "20min" to set the task duration (other than default)
• use your custom trigger word specified in Settings to change color of some tasks to red
• add e.g. "d18:30" or "d9:05" in tasks to denote the time when they were finished (or use extension for it)
• if needed, add e.g. "d30%" or "d90%" (or click task) to track progress – the task duration will be shown shorter in spiral until the progress reaches 100% and changes to DONE
• during a day: reorder tasks and move some of them after fixed events to ensure they will not be planned earlier

Quick Start Videos

Basic usage

Click here to see the video.

Using progress tracker and red color overwrite

Click here to see the video.

Setup (you do this only once)

1. First, make sure that User code is enabled in your settings.

This allows custom components in your graph.

Technically, the spiral component is a code inserted using a Roam template into a block on a Daily Page.

2. Install the TODO Trigger extension for a better experience

I strongly suggest installing David Vargas's great Todo Trigger extension from the Roam Depot before using Nautilus and setting it to add a timestamp when to-do is done automatically.

3. Adjust your settings

Additionally, you can easily change parameters to better suit your needs (in the Roam Depot extension Settings):

• set your workday start time; choices are 6am, 7am, 8am (default)
• set the text (e.g. tag) prefix that will be inserted above the the spiral
• set the length of the legend text (longer task description than specified will be stripped from spiral legend)
• set the default duration of the task (when creating a new to-do, you can leave it without specifics and it will default to the setting)
• set the custom word or #tag that will enforce red color ovewrite for important tasks in spiral (choose simple word or #word tag without spaces and brackets in the Settings; then activate the same notation in your text blocks; do not use [[word]] or #[[word]], it will not match.)

Important: All settings will not manifest retroactively in old Nautiluses, but just when creating a new instance using the ;;Nautilus template.

Daily Use (you do this every day)

1. Insert the component into your Daily Page

The easiest way to insert the component is through Roam’s native template menu. Type ;; and select “Nautilus...”. Press Enter or click on it.

which inserts this code:

Press Enter again and Tab to indent the first child block under the component. Now you can start writing your task list.

2. Put your tasks and events as a child block

• If you are not able to edit the children blocks of the Nautilus block, try pressing Cmd(Ctrl)-Enter which opens the first block of the page for editing.
• Move or indent a list of your to-dos into a Nautilus children blocks.
• From now you can edit and rearrange your children blocks as you wish and see how your work spots are dynamically rearranged and filled with your tasks.

Enjoy!

Additional Info

• I published an article How I learned to plan better (and what to do when your head doesn’t get lists) about my Nautilus journey recently.
• The order and the duration of your tasks can be changed only by you. The app does not change it.
• A notable and the only "automatic" feature of Nautilus is the task push-forward: relocating uncompleted tasks within open time slots in your day – taking the present moment into account. The spiral constantly reflects time without your intervention.
• If the Nautilus is not placed into today’s Daily Page, the red time beam is not shown, and tasks are not pushed into the future.
• You can define your agenda using a straightforward notation:
  • events are rows containing a time range in 24h or 12h format (HH:MM-HH:MM, minutes can be omitted) and are fixed until the time range is changed by the user (e.g., "12:30-13 Meeting with JK", "9-10am Breakfast", "11am-14pm Presentation").
  • tasks are all residual rows that are not events; undone tasks move through a day (e.g., "nearly empty task" "{{[[TODO]]}} another, but important task").
• Tasks duration defaults to a 15-minute time allocation, but this can be adjusted in the Roam Depot extension Settings or individually for each task in your task list with the simple notation Mm or Mmin where M is the length of a task in minutes (e.g., "Call Jack 10m", "Daily workout 45min").
• Especially when working on long tasks, you can track the progress by clicking task on daily page or adding the dXX% marker where XX denotes percentage of the task done. E.g. "Writing a memo 120m d50%" means you dedicated 2 hours for the task and half of it is done – so the task occupies only 1/2 of the space in spiral.
• The order of tasks in a Nautilus spiral reflects exactly the order of tasks in the list. You have to prioritize them by itself – in the morning and later during a day.
• Tasks can be forced to follow after a particular event too – simply by placing them after the event in the task list; for example: to plan "Nap" not before lunch, just put it after it in the list. This does not change the order of tasks.
• Once a task is marked 'DONE' in Roam, (and if you have installed the Todo Trigger extension) it's tagged with the completion time in the format dHH:MM (e.g. d14:30), which is visually interpreted as a light grey section on the spiral. It can serve as a visual log of tasks that have been completed.

Tips and Tricks

• Nautilus works pretty well on mobile too.
• I suggest describing your tasks in a very short (BuJo-like) style. Optionally add detailed description of each into children blocks.
• References and markdown links are stripped heavily to show only the real name of the task in legend.
• You can use "to" in events time range definition too (e.g., "14:30 to 15:15 My TED Talk").
• You can use Roam references to blocks in your task list. It means you can just Alt/Option + drag and drop tasks from other pages/blocks without having to rewrite them from scratch.
• Do your planning in the morning or even the evening before. It seems like Nautilus involves extended preparation before a workday, but my experience is that it greatly aids conscientous day planning and eventual task optimization.
• I usually add a prefix #Agenda preceding the Nautilus render block (via Settings). The inserted render blocks look like this: #Agenda {{[[roam/render]]:((roam-render-Nautilus-cljs)) 22 30 8 "#TOP"}} so clicking later on #Agenda tag helps me to quickly gather all my old Nautiluses.
• Sorry for some glitches when generating the proper position of the legend in some edge cases. This is the first version – even for someone like me that has been using Nautilus for 6 months without bigger issues, there are still some problems and a lot of work still has to be done.

Changelog

• 31/1/2024 – now autodetects 12h format in time-range (supports both 24h and 12h time format – if no am/pm specified in the task, defaults to 24h format)
• 1/2/2024 – added an option to change workday start time (the first select option in Settings now, defaults to 8am) – I think the prettiest proportions has a 8am-Nautilus but I understand some of us are early birds!
• 2/3/2024 – added an option to set a trigger string or tag (no spaces allowed!) to individually rewrite task/event color to red
• 2/3/2024 – added an progress tracking option (increases progress by 10 % clicking on task slice until done)

Feature Requests, Bugs, and Feedback and Credits

Nautilus is work in progress. I am happy to remove bugs or listen to your feedback! Contact me via https://barys.me.

Huge thanks to the Roam Slack community, especially to Matt Vogel, which helped me to understand how the Roam Depot extensions (roam/render) work. His Roam Depot Render Template is being adopted here. Thanks to Baibhav Bista from Roam Research company for his kindness and patience with my beginner's mistakes during the review process. Many thanks to Adam Kalisz, a developer behind OrgPad (written in ClojureScript) that helped me to grasp and find love in functional programming. Thanks to all my beta-testers too.