Doyen is a recursive acronym for Doyen Organizes Your Efforts Now. Doyen is a personal task management application that does exactly that; it helps you keep track of your life from one easy to use, fully featured program.

Yes, you must have installed the JRE 1.4 (or JDK) or greater. You can find versions for nearly every operating system here. Doyen will not work with the Microsoft VM, only with the official, standards compliant version from Sun.

For any operating system, you first must install the JRE 1.4+. Then unzip the Doyen file anywhere on your computer (but remember where). Once you have successfully installed java, you can either double click the doyen.jar file (Windows/Mac), or from a command line, go to the to base directory where you unzipped Doyen and type "java -jar lib/doyen.jar (Unix).

On Windows, if you have winzip or a similar compression program set up to open .jar files (the default for many), this can make it difficult to run Doyen. The only solution to this is to open the compression program (whatever program loads when you double click doyen.jar) and adjust the file association settings. In most compression programs there will be a checklist of file types to associate with the program, simply uncheck the .jar (or JAR) option and click ok. Close the program and then try running Doyen again by double clicking the doyen.jar file.

You can put the doyen (.dyn) file anywhere on your computer. If you save it to a location, Doyen will remember that location in the future and always try to open your file there. If you move your file afterwards, you can always open it again by selecting File->Open and browsing to the new location of your file.

Doyen is written in a using Java, a cross-platform technology that enables a program to be run on any time of computer. With normal programs, they are optimized for a specific operating system such as Windows, however you cannot use the program on any other system. Doyen can be used on any system that has Java installed, however using Java does mean a small performance penalty. We feel that the slight speed reduction is a small price to pay for being able to have 1 program that can run on any type of system.

As Doyen runs it keeps an up to date version of your data file. There is no need to worry about saving, Doyen will take care of it automatically. Saving occurs whenever you close a file or exit the program. If your data is very critical, it may be a good idea to keep a backup copy of your data file somewhere, but this strategy is not just for Doyen, it is wise to keep backup copies of any critical data you may have.

Fixed time tasks correspond to things such as meetings or appointments. They are things that have to occur at a certain time on a certain date, often with some kind of recurrence. Flexible tasks on the other hand, can take place at any time and usually take a certain amount of time. An example of a flexible task is studying for an exam or doing laundry. There is no specific time scheduled, only a specific amount of time (if even that).

A project is a collection of tasks. The project item serves to organize your tasks into subgroups, therefore making it easier for you to keep track of things. Projects can also contain sub-projects to further help organization.

Whenever you are working on a current task (when you select a task and push the "switch" button), Doyen keep track of the time you are spending. If you pause or end the task (without switching to another), Doyen will stop its time tracking until you resume or switch to a new task. Doyen needs to be running to keep track of the time you spend on various tasks. So if you want to see what percentage of your time is spent sleeping, just create a flexible task called "sleep" and switch to it whenever you sleep. Just make sure to keep Doyen running throughout the night. In the morning you can switch to another task, such as "sleep more."