3 February 2005

Genius idea #6

A personal, editable Gantt chart of your life.

My memory's not the best, so I'm always looking for ways to supplement what's missing. I'm often misremembering when I saw Costello in concert, what year we went to Paris, when I worked for Attachmate and when they closed their Atlanta offices. Tedius little things that don't necessarily need to be remembered with precision but could be if maintaining that precision were easy.

A blog/diary is one way to handle all of this, but it's very limiting in certain aspects. People understand diagrams more readily than text. The only visual representation that blogs generally have is groupings by time and category. Importance or duration is buried in text.

I want a Gantt chart that encompasses and automatically integrates my blog, email, calendar, and photos. I want it to be taggable and editable. I should be able to add events and link to external content. Equally important, I want it to embody a collapsing hieararchy so the views could depict a customizable range of granularity.

This sounds a little too geeky to be interesting to anyone but geeks, but it's not so different from a photo album or scrap book. In those, you collect all the tangible (and flat) markings of events in your life within a timeline. You include concert tickets, photos, napkins from nice restaurants, wine lables, or magazine clippings. The LifeGantt (not affilliated with iLife) would subsume your digital information automatically and allow you to easily integrate new information. Everything would then be searchable, categorized (my work history, nice restaurants I've been to), presented in a timeline, and available in a hierarchy (trips, trips > vacations, trips > vacations > San Francisco).

Maybe I could use this open source Gantt software. Eventually, the LifeBlog captures could be integrated.

[ posted by sstrader on 3 February 2005 at 12:08:14 PM in Misc ]