Calendar, Not Todos (2018)

I've started putting personal items into my calendar, and find it does help, but my philosophy isn't really one of time management. Rather, it's one of giving my personal life the same level of importance my work life gets.

Work puts lots of items on my calendar -- recurring weekly meetings, kick off meetings, daily syncs, etc. And there's things I want to do, eg go to the gym, practice guitar, etc. I resisted putting the latter sort of thing on, because honestly I'm not a huge calendar person by default. Or todo person. I find it stressful and overwhelming. But I shifted my thinking to seeing the calendar not as a todo list, but as a visualization of things I believe are important. In that view, then giving my gym time a regular slot and putting it on the calendar gives it equal billing with all those work entries.

I've found this helpful and it has made me feel better about my calendar in general. It's not time management, or even commitments, but visible prioritization, with myself included as someone I prioritize.

Except 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.

"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.

> Make every task you would like to do — including meetings, “to-do’s”, doing nothing, watching Game of Thrones — a calendar entry.

If your stress level is so high that doing nothing becomes a task you have to schedule ahead of time, you’ve got bigger problems than a calendar app can solve.

I 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.

If one's Calendar is so scheduled like the one seen in the picture in the article, one need re-think their life. I've also moved to Calendar quite a while back but my target is to have as much free time each day to push and pull things around.

No more dependent on tools but learn the ideas/patterns from a bunch of them. I still use the Native macOS Apps as my triad - Calendar, Notes, and Reminder.

I do have a running list, in plain-text (Markdown), of "May Do Them". I realize quite a lot of them falls of or gets done on its own.

My inspirations and way of thinking which I still remember on the top of my head, these days, are;

- Think in terms of The Eisenhower Method https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_management#The_Eisenhower...

- Push/pull around based on priority and I found a nice visualization on Show HN https://nautilus-omnibus.web.app

- Every week of my Calendar is fitted kinda like TeuxDeux, though I do the manual weekly chore of pushing around the task https://teuxdeux.com Here ToDos that do not need to be timed goes up on the top of the day and I just pushed them around when done. If something needs a time, I put it at the right time to block it to no conflict with others, etc.

- I also use my faithful Paper Notebook, and start backward from the last pages as list of ToDo that I have not calendared. Perhaps something I need to do quickly, which I remember while writing but do not want to distract. Add a checkbox in front of each line, and tick them off or strikethrough them.

- If I'm on the Notes app, then I just follow what I do above but on Notes (it has checklist and stuffs).

- Finally, I'm testing with some sort of help from an assistant. I'm tinkering with macOS's Reminders and it has become pretty powerful these days.

Calendar scheduling works well for certain personalities. I personally hate it and it works horribly for me.

But for a long time it was the only answer I was aware of and articles like these that pass the methodology off without mentioning other possible ones only reinforced the incorrect ideas that this was THE way.

Many people prefer to do lists, because that is priority rather than time based.

Also, calendaring everything is such future-self-micromanaging that I feel it, for me, to be deeply disconnecting.

I prefer to stack my priorities and work at whatever is most important.

It is more effective than strictly efficient tho of course it's both.

I do think productivity writers need a better sense of others, often.

Absolutely 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:

https://benkoworks.com/shortlist-your-tasks/

No single method suits everyone - it's why books like GTD help a little but only for some. My child has about 10 things to do every week, so her memory is mostly enough. I have about 20 things to do every day, so I use a combo of list and schedule.

This book is my bible - it teaches you how to create your own ideal time management system based on your brain, your life's demands and so on: Perfect Time-based Productivity by Francis Wade[1]

[1] https://perfect.mytimedesign.com/

Calendar doesn't work for me and since my ADHD diagnoses I know why -- I need a constant rotating set of micro and macro lists to barely keep some perspective of more than 2 days from now and get shit done.

Moving everything to a calendar immediately becomes background ignore noise for me and it's even worse because it comes from that bothersome box the phone

Living 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.

I use org-mode for todos, which is pretty damned nice (after a sharp learning curve).

It lets me link to Jira, email, slack, and files in one place.

I'm planning on adding TODO and BUG entries from my code files into an org-based tracking system as well. I'm going to need to come up with a filter for them, though. I slap TODOs everywhere. org-mode and org-agenda also can't handle thousands of files (I've tried).

I'll need some way to promote TODOs into an active state. Maybe ripgrep all my files for the keywords, add the files to an index, and maybe with Projectile, I can add the TODOs to an active org-agenda state.

Like 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.

I learned decades ago that I need to do the opposite of this. To-do lists, not calendars. Calendars are for coordinating activities with others, not for organizing my internal work.

This is purely because of the way my brain works. I cannot know in advance what task I will be able to perform effectively at a given time, and I cannot "force" myself to do a task inappropriate for my current state without losing a lot of efficiency and motivation.

So, they go on to-do lists and I select the items from that list as I progress through the days.

So, 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.

This kind of planning may not work because of the difficulty of estimating tasks and the nuances that arise, but what about the similar idea of recording not what to do, but what has been done? For example, a text document where you can enter the date and time by keyboard shortcuts and keep a record of what you have done at regular intervals? Something like

20240513131516 posted a new comment here

Has anyone tried something similar or maybe there's some common name for it?

It's nice in theory, but it's very cumbersome in practice.

Some things, absolutely. Maybe you can even schedule most things when the stars align. But not all tasks fit into a calendar (think subtasks in a project that you don't know when you'll handle, if ever).

If all you have is the calendar hammer, then all tasks looks like nails.

This is the essential principle behind Getting Things Done. If you’ve got to do something, and it takes more than 90 seconds, book time for it.

If you need someone else’s input, schedule a time to check in with them for their inputs if they don’t get back to you by X time.

Been using this for years and it has worked really well for me.

I have replaced my calendar with todos. But not to the extent of this author.

I don’t fill it with junk — “watching game of thrones” (wtf), but it’s filled with items that generally have a due date.

- due date for water bill

- due date for credit card bill

Then it’s repeated monthly.

I have my creditors setup to auto withdraw from a throwaway bank account (I only keep it funded with the amount needed to pay my bills). Calendar reminder is there to remind me to check if throwaway bank account is funded sufficiently.

I do kind of like the idea of a “done” calendar which will give a better visual indication rather than just dismissing the cal notification

Going 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.

I 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.

As a neurodivergent, the idea of scheduling this tightly makes me physically sick. I do need structure, even to the point of "I'm going to veg for two hours", but having it in a calendar entry will make me immediately ignore it.

To lists work really well, but I have to have a (at least) two-tier system. Stuff I'm doing now and a backlog. If all I've got is the backlog, it's too overwhelming

Feels like this is a game. The game resembles those wooden puzzle games, with a 8x8 grid of sliding wooden pieces, where one piece is missing. You push a piece around to complete the picture, but when you do, lots of other pieces get moved around and destroy the progress you've made.

I really love this simple breakdown and the assumptions given.

OP here - submitted this because devi just spoke at ICLR and mentioned this post so i looked it up. i’m not nee to calendar as todo list but found it hard to implement in practice. in her talk she simply said she’s done it her whole life and found it weird others dont do it

Feels very alien to me. I'm a dad. Life is built around the children's calendar

For those on ios - check out “Structured”. It’s a nice mix of both.

https://apps.apple.com/app/id1499198946

Learnt this from a cxo few years ago and this has certainly helped - to be able to make time for yourself, every workspace task should be a calendar entry.

When David Allen released his book "Getting Things Done" (GTD) over 20 years ago, it was like a revelation. Everyone was into GTD and was creating lists, defining contexts (@errands, @groceries, @phone, etc.) and talking about "Inbox Zero": process everything into meaningful lists, leave no stack (email-inbox or desktop) unprocessed.

David Allen was fully into lists, and he recommended not to use the calendar for task management, only for appointments. It was "sacred terrority". Why? Because the calendar can never hold as many items as lists, and he had hundreds of items in those lists. And he started his system from the observation that people manage their lives with their calendards, because they don't have better alternatives.

Fast forward twenty years later: After a detour via Bullet Journals (slow down, create one page for the day, and try to focus only on those items), the calendar and time boxing are all the new rave. Why? Because lists tend to be a magnet for items, and they get more new entries than we can process.

I am predicting the calendar will be out of fashion for task management in a year or so. And then we'll go back to post-its maybe?

The thing is, no system is able to handle the amount of commitments we have in modern day life, either internal (I'd like to lose weight, be a good father, community member, have control over my personal finances, be a good spouse, etc.) or external.

Observing people who are highly productive, I realize they don't even have a task management app or a proper calendar. They use whatever they have (a piece of paper, Notes app in iOS, their email inbox (mailing themselves), or whatnot), but they have a sense of urgency, laser-like focus, and ignore most of the demands thrown at them, looking like egoistic psychopaths, but getting big sh*t done, all the while we mere mortals write on HN or curate our (latest) todo lists or calendars.

What to make of it? Productive people use what is available, put more focus on the task at hand instead of the tools, and have a sense of urgency and focus on very few things.

I dislike the basic premise: that estimates are a good idea.

That's why I like Shape Up in principle over planning poker or other similar things.

I don't use either of them and things have worked just fine for me.