The Meta Work Plan: The Work Plan of Work Plans

Ability to create a Work Plan of Work Plans, a Meta Work Plan comprising a list of existing Work Plans that you can add, remove, enable/disable, and reorder. The Meta Work Plan would behave like any regular Work Plan and run manually or scheduled.

I imagine the UI would look like the current Work Plan editor, only have Work Plans in its list instead of Areas/Sidewalks/Deadends. The Meta Work Plan would automatically pick up on changes made to the Work Plans it contains.

Use Case: As a Yarbo user, I have separate Work Plans for each Area and its Deadends or Sidewalks for testing and convenience. If I want to mow and schedule, say, “the Areas near the road,” I need to manually create a large Work Plan with all those entries from the smaller Work Plans. Snowblowing, too – “run my driveway Work Plans,” “run my back forty Work Plans so I can get to my firewood and into the shed”. I would like to have a Meta Work Plan that can combine these Work Plans into a larger Work Plan for a few reasons:

  • Thematic Property Management (:trade_mark:): I’d like to mow or schedule “all my road-facing Areas” a few times a week and have a “mow all the stuff I don’t care about” day maybe once a week. At this time I need to create and schedule larger Work Plans manually to achieve this when all I’d really need to do is run a few existing Work Plans.

  • Easier maintenance: This would decrease the number of Work Areas I would have to maintain. If I add a Deadend, for example, I need to remember to add it to its own Area’s Work Plan AND add it to the larger Work Plan I have manually created. With a Meta Work Plan, I’d have to add the Deadend to the Area’s Work Plan, and it would get picked up automatically on my “mow all my road-facing Work Plans” day.

  • Easier scheduling: I can select a Theme and run it that day, or schedule it every N days. Using small Work Areas means guessing at End Times, and that can cut things short or create slack time. I could set a Schedule that looks more like “Working Hours” and dump a large Meta Work Plan in there for the day, thus ensuring constant and the most efficient mowing with no slack time other than recharges.

I would expect to be able to manage the list of Work Plans, run the Meta Work Plan manually, and Schedule the Meta Work Plan.

(And if Meta Work Plan is silly, call it a Theme…or something.)

(And @Yarbo-Forum – please please please – the App needs to stop deleting an entire Work Plan when a mapped item it has enabled is deleted…that is painful…just remove it from the Work Plan. Oh the pain…the pain…)

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Thank you so much for sharing this thoughtful feature request along with such a detailed use case. This kind of input is exactly what our product team looks for when evaluating new ideas, and I’ll definitely pass your suggestion along for their consideration.

That said, this feature may not be prioritized in the short term, as similar results can currently be achieved by manually creating another combined Work Plan—though we completely understand how inconvenient and time-consuming that can be in your situation.

Regarding the issue where an entire Work Plan gets deleted when one of its mapped items is removed: our product team has already received this feedback and plans to optimize the this in the future.

We truly appreciate your contributions and look forward to hearing more of your insights and ideas. Thanks again for helping us improve!

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