Use the Edit Gapfillers Menu command to customize
which items appear on the Gapfillers menu. The Gapfillers
menu can contain up to 40 entries of your choice.
Gapfillers are most useful for TimeTo™ users who wish to account for all their time each day. Choosing a gapfiller is the equivalent of creating a New Item, then choosing the Done & Fill Gap command. A good portion of our day is made up of commonly occurring unplanned events. A gapfiller is a Done Item which you can easily insert into your schedule with one menu click, thus eliminating the need to create an item, give it a title, specify its duration to fill the gap, then mark it Done.
Here are some examples of gapfillers you could choose to add to your Gapfillers menu:
Take phone call unrelated to projects
Answer unexpected e-mail
Take a break
Fix a machine
Unexpected visitor
When you choose a title from the Gapfillers menu, a Done Item with that title is added to your schedule, and marked Done with a duration equal to the available gap of time between the previous Done Item and the current time of day. Thus, it fills the gap in your day's history. You can then optionally choose to edit the title, duration or any other aspect of it.
You can also insert Done items on past days from
the Gapfillers menu, by simply viewing a past date,
then highlighting an item earlier than where the gapfiller should be slotted later than... then select the desired title from the Gapfillers
menu.
When you choose the Edit Gapfillers Menu command, a text document window appears. You can then edit the list of titles that appear on the menu. When you are pleased with you list, close the window and agree to Save. Each title cannot exceed 78 characters, and there cannot be more than 40 titles (if you have more than 40, any beyond that will simply not appear on the Gapfillers menu: everything else will function normally).
If you put an ampersand (&) before a letter in a gapfiller's title, then that letter will be highlighted with an underscore on the menu and you will only need to press that one letter to choose the title from the menu. The ampersand is typically put at the beginning of the title, however you can put it anywhere you'd like (for instance, to wisely avoid a letter of the alphabet being used more than once). For instance, you could include Fix A Machine or &Fix A Machine or Fix A Ma&chine.
Troubleshooting: If you are inserting a gapfiller on today's view, and are surprised to find it has a zero duration when you were expecting it to fill a gap, check to see if you any items earlier in your list that have been started and are still running. Such an item understandable may be eating upp all the available remaining time in the day, and hence any gapfillers added while it is still running are forced to have a zero duration.
Technical Notes: These menu titles are stored in a plain text file called surprise.lst in your TimeTo folder, so if you prefer you can edit that list directly in a text editor of your choice rather than using the Edit Gapfillers Menu command. If the surprise.lst file doesn't exist, TimeTo™ will offer to create an empty such file when you select the Edit Gapfillers Menu command.
Related Topics
Customizing TimeTo