Calendar, Not Todos (2018)
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Calendar, Not Todos (2018)
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Re: Calendar, Not Todos (2018)
#2Going to have to hard-disagree on this one. Maybe it's my many years of GTD speaking, but Calendar is a sacred space for me. Nothing goes to my calendar unless it's something that has to be done at that specific date or date-time.
I want to see the real hard boundaries of my schedule, understand where the flexible space is, and juggle with that according to what life is throwing at me today.
Filling your calendar with all your todos will completely mess this up. You don't have a quick bird-eye view of what is really important to be done, and what is wishful thinking.
Not to speak of the time you will be wasting "managing" your calendar entries now.
Side-note: I don't know if anyone else feels the same, but I've grown a kind of jerk reaction every time I read or listen(YT videos mostly) someone sayying "many people have asked me about X". It's more often than not, bullshit. Nobody asked you anything, you just want a reason to speak your opinion, that's fine.
Re: Calendar, Not Todos (2018)
#3I tried it but went back to todo list.
Managing or not managing your calendar has zero affect on the time it takes to complete the task. Managing the calendar actually consumes energy plus time that I could've used for doing the actual work instead.
Now I look at my todo list and move some things up, some things down in priority and get back at work.
Only the tasks that need to be done at the right time go to my calendar like meetings and appointments.
Re: Calendar, Not Todos (2018)
#4Except when something takes a different time than needed, it makes a domino effect on the calendar. And even if something takes less time, it has a disruptive effect on the calendar.
Writing a piece of documentation (no code, nothing can compile or crush) can not be estimated to take precisely 30 minutes. Solving a bug may take a minute or hours, in case nothing goes unexpected (if it does, it can be days or unsolvable). So, especially in the latter case, I cannot imagine how the calendar is superior to to-do lists and sprints.
In sprints, single estimates and be wildly off, but we can still work reliably with averages.
Re: Calendar, Not Todos (2018)
#5I used to do this, but I quickly found that it takes too much time (heh) to plan this way.
Trying to estimate how long something will take (usually wrong), constantly having to reschedule and split events, not to mention the hassle of creating events for trivial things because “time is everything”. It’s exhausting and inefficient.
I now only have meetings on my calendar, with a few blocks of “focus time” where I do my best to crunch through my tasks.
My tasks are kept in a list, weakly prioritized.
Re: Calendar, Not Todos (2018)
#6Like others I've tried this before but it's just too much effort to use this approach as you spend a lot of time rejigging your calendar as it's so granular with the time dimension. Not to mention trying to coordinate it with meetings and your actual schedule.
That said, I do like using a calendar approach for tasks. I've previously used TeuxDeux successfully - it's basically just a todo list per day and it makes it easy to plan things ahead of time and move them around as reality bites and you need to move it to a later date.
Re: Calendar, Not Todos (2018)
#7Absolutely cannot work. Neither due dates nor prioritised task lists can withstand the rigours of a real work day.
I submit to you that the only useful prioritisation strategy is shortlisting:
Re: Calendar, Not Todos (2018)
#8"Your bottleneck is time management, and not motivation."
If indeed motivation, forgetfulness, procastrination and rapidly changing priorities were not a thing this would be great advice for me. Unfortunately for my distracted self this would be unmaintainable in any time span.
I can live by a mix of todo-lists (some with a deadline, most prioritised and all categorised), a red line in my agenda telling me when all the weekly/daily scheduled events are and bright coloured, triple alarmed random events breaking up the pattern. My goof off hours are after getting something done and before the next notification blaring from my phone.
Re: Calendar, Not Todos (2018)
#9So, today, 12-14h task X, after that "task Y" until 16h, then "cook lunch, eat" util 17h.
It's 14:00, I just need to recompile X, make a .deb and upload it to a test server... 20 minutes max, and the others in the team can then test stuff and do their jobs... do I stop X and continue tomorrow, while everyone waits? Do I shrink Y to acommodate the lost time? where do I add "editing calendar" tasks? 5 minute slots between full hours?
I'll stay with to-do lists.
Re: Calendar, Not Todos (2018)
#10Living your life from to do lists and/or calendars is just depressing. I use a calendar but I don't put everything in there. Just ones to remember. For example, pet appointments are in there but me watching Netflix is not.