Feature request: allow task durations to be specified instead of start times

[balint-bg]

I do love the plugin and use it a ton.
One thing that would make my life a bit easier is if I could specify durations for tasks, rather than concrete start times.
There are several reasons for this:

• unplanned tasks do come in and interrupt the pre-planned flow
• planned tasks sometimes take longer (or, less frequently, shorter) to complete
• occasionally planned tasks get moved to other days or cancelled altogether (e.g. meetings get moved to later in the same day, or even to other days, people cancel stuff etc).
• I sometimes forget to plan for a task, even though I know it's coming and needs to be done, but simply forget to add it to the daily planner
  In all these cases, I have to re-adjust the start times for every task that follows the change. This is not only toilsome, manual task but also error prone.

So, perhaps we could have a setting for each note (or even sections within notes): is the note absolute time - based, or duration - based?
If it's absolute time based, then the current behavior remains, no change.
But if it's relative time (duration) - based, then:

• need to specify a start time (the current way for doing this is totally fine, e.g. - [ ] 9:00 BEGIN
• every following entry would need to specify a duration, for example: - [ ] 1:15 silly meeting would mean that there's a silly meeting during the day that takes 1 hour 15 minutes.
• tasks would be rendered in the order they are specified in the note
• now, if said silly meeting gets bumped out by 3 hours, I simply move the line to a later part in the note, and all other tasks would re-adjust their start and end times.

Alternatively, in place of a setting, one could also specify the format of the time specification for each task.
E.g. for tasks with set start times the current syntax would prevail: - [ ] 13:30 silly meeting , but for relative (duration-based) entries, one would say - [ ] d0:45, the d prefix denoting that the following time spec is for duration. (45 minutes in this case).

I do realize that there's complexity in lining up a mix of absolute and relative times, and how to handle overlaps for example. I have some ideas for that too but I wanted to put this out there as-is for early feedback. Thanks!!!

[TheraFu]

I'd love to have this too!

[imeed166]

Me too, duration of tasks instead of start times is much easier, I would use it a lot.

[lilacblossom]

Agreed!

[cynoglav]

support!