Appointments

Appointments are fixed times where you are usually meeting up with other people. Examples of appointments are meetings, going to the dentist and birthday parties.

Appointments are recorded in JXCirrus Diary (and JXCirrus Project) for 2 reasons:

Reminding You...

The main reason that you enter appointments into JXCirrus Diary is so that you can see what your appointments are. The system will even helpfully tell you if any of your appointments clash.

You can see appointments in:

The system makes sure you see upcoming appointments wherever you are.

You also get reminders pop up in the notification list at the top left of the main screen. By default, you it will warn you 15 minutes before the appointment, but you can change that time using Preferences.

Available Time

The other key thing about appointments is that the time isn't available for anything else. When the system is planning tasks, it will not have any tasks planned during an appointment. It just takes the appointment time away from the time available for task work.

Information for an Appointment

Start Time

This is the starting date/time for the appointment. To enter this, just type in the date and time - See Dates.

End Time

This is the end date/time for the appointment. As with the start time, just type in the date and time (or just the time if it is today).

Completion

An appointment that has its completion set at 0% is an appointment that you haven't been to yet. This means that the system will keep warning you and nagging you about it. By marking the appointment as complete (setting the completion to 100% or just using Entry -> Complete, you are saying "I have been to this appointment. Bother me no more..."

Repeating Information

Appointments can be set to repeat as often as you like (for things like daily meetings). See Repeating Tasks/Appointments.

Dependencies

Oddly enough, tasks and appointments can depend on each other. See Dependencies.

If you set an appointment to depend on a task, what the system will do is set the due date of the task to be the start time of the appointment.   This could be handy if you have a task to prepare an agenda for a meeting...

If you set a task to depend on an appointment, the system will set the start-after time for the task to be the finishing time for the appointment (i.e. the task can only start once the appointment is finished).   This could be handy if you have a task to write up the minutes of a meeting...

Time Spent

You can record sessions against an appointment in exactly the same way you can record them against tasks. Good for keeping track of the time you spend in meetings!

Time Type

When you are editing an appointment, you can set the Time Type for the appointment. Appointments have a couple of special time-type values.

Tricks with Appointments

Handling Clashing Appointments

JXCirrus will warn you about any appointments that clash. Sometimes you just can't avoid these (maybe two different people are coming to visit and will overlap a bit). To stop the system complaining, set the Time Type of one of the appointments to "Free". The system will not complain about clashing appointments with Free time.

Getting Extra Work Time

Imagine that you are using JXCirrus Diary to plan your work day. Maybe you have a deadline tomorrow, and you need to work back. One way to give yourself more time for jobs is to create an appointment (call it, say, "Extra Time") starting at 5PM and ending at 8PM. Set the time type to "Work". The system will set 5PM to 8PM available for Work tasks. It will also take that time away from other tasks (such as Home tasks). You could also do this using the Work Hours dialog, but this gives you a quick way to enter extra time.

Another use might be getting work done during a very long appointment. Imagine someone from your family is staying for the weekend. That means that the whole weekend is no longer available for any work. You could put a mini appointment on Saturday afternoon with the Time Type set to Home (or similar) - Just long enough to get the lawns mowed and the llamas fed.