This only works if you honour your commitments, or don’t have to change plans a lot.

The David’s reasoning for not scheduling flexible tasks was simple: Don’t lose the HAVE TO DO TODAY amid the PLAN TO DO TODAY.

Time Management for Dummies by Jeffrey J. Mayer (who also wrote a book about ACT which I highly recommend for anyone using Windows, but use the version that works with ACT for Palm) said that we ought to schedule EVERYTHING. The theory there is that if you don’t plan WHEN you will do it, you probably WON’T do it.

So how have I dealt with these two reasonable but contradictory ideals?

Here’s what I have come up with:

1) things that HAVE to be done TODAY get scheduled in my calendar with a time attached.

2) things I want to do today get scheduled w/o a time attached (this is possible in ACT but I don’t know if it is possibe in Palm Datebook).

When I schedule new NEXT ACTION I put in when I want to do it, but w/o a time. That way I can look down the calendar and see the HAVE TO DO TODAY items and the other items.

Best of both, at least so far.

I used to stick to DA’s GTD doctrine and not ‘schedule’ tasks, then gave that up. Scheduling my tasks has for me been a Very Good Thing. As Merlin put it, I’m making ‘paper walls’ to give me an idea of what the hell is going on in the next seven days or whatever. Scheduling tasks, along with my Palm’s built-in plain vanilla Tasks that shows items by date or by category really keeps me in control of things. I read GTD and have probably thoroughly bastardized the whole thing, but I guess that’s part of the point right? Adapting it to your own needs?

Actually, Keith is away and that post was guest blogged by Peter Flaschner.

I now return you to your regular programming.

Well.. I’ve tried doing this but phone calls, people popping into my office, emails, etc.. are not schedule friendly…

Flashback: i did this as a student. I was a full time commuter student for several years and often had days where I had classes at 8 o’clock, 1 o’clock and 4 o’clock (or some variation). I stayed on campus all day, usually, and obviously tried to complete homework during the in-between hours (in addition to picking up chicks, of course)— but to do this, I of course had to have brought the right books from home.

At some point, I got tired of having to check my syllabi every morning, decide what assignment should take priority, and pack books accordingly. So, eventually, I made a document template that showed a week’s worth of “on-time” (classes/other commitments) and “off-time”— and i assigned each specific block of “off-time” to a specific category of homework (e.g., Mondays 10-1 would ALWAYS be “do this week’s reading for American Studies,” etc.) I carried a folder of these blank templates, and each week started a new one, using it the way i had previously used an assignment book: as the professor reminds of the reading for the next class, write it into its assigned block. And then there were also “wild card” blocks for stuff like “work on pending long-term papers”, etc.

This had the benefit of injecting structure into what otherwise tended to be long periods of laziness alternating with short bursts of frantic activity. Plus, I could use what I knew about my own work habits: better suited for reading than statistics homework in the afternoon, better suited for paper-writing in the morning, and so on. And finally, it tended to keep me from stretching tasks out for too long— i could tell myself that i had budgeted 2 hours to get the AMST reading done, and that’s long enough, and get down to it, and if you finish early, well more time for picking up chicks (because that was “free” time in that everything else on my to-do list was plugged into somewhere else on my schedule). That was a great incentive for not dragging my feet…

It worked pretty well— i kept at it for a whole semester. Then, the next semester, it just didn’t work as well. If i had, i would have moved on to the next logical step: spiral binding a bunch of these suckers so i’d have a whole semester’s worth bundled together.

Though my girlfriend teased me mercilessly about my “nerd sheets,” i was secretly quite proud, basically because IT WORKED FOR ME and I INVENTED IT ON MY OWN.

Thanks for letting me share.

Interestingly, The Now Habit says that the schedule should contain the “hard landscape” stuff, plus scheduled time for recreation — but not upcoming work. For some folks, having too much work staring them in the face can lead to anxiety and procrastination.

I am one those people Mark B. mentions. I used to schedule work blocks in Outlook and it didn’t work for me. The nature of my work is that I get interrupted a lot. Therefore, I might block off the entire morning to work on a particular web project, but get interrupted (by things that are also part of my duties) and not get the project done. I absolutely hated having to move projects to the afternoon or next day. Now I put Next Actions in my tasklist, with due dates where necessary (these become highlighted if not completed on the date assigned and are a mild “nag” that way), and just calendar things like meetings and appointments. Also, I don’t put every single Next Action on the Outlook task list. I used to do that, too, but it just overwhelmed me looking at it. I put a handful of Next Actions there and can just refill when necessary from my Next Actions list, kept in a Word file.

One slight adjustment I make to the Next Action list is simply to jot down the length of time I expect that action to take. I find this has had great payoff for me, as previously I was unconciously wondering how long things would take, everytime I glanced at the list.

So when I have a block of time, I just look for the largest task that will fit in that block. It’s like “right-sizing” your schedule.

This article is spooky. I had been doing exactly the same thing (scheduling EVERYTHING) for quite some time. Then, I ran into a little utility called TaskLine that automatically completes the scheduling directly from the task list. Ever since I started using TaskLine (which integrates with GTD BTW) I ahve been in scheduling heaven and AM getting things done. Here I thought I was a hedonist .

Link to TaskLine… http://www.taskline.com/

Check it out! For me, it compliments GTD Outlook VERY well!

I love seeing how (and how much) people add structure to the limitless to-do lists.

My own strategy is to really work the Someday/Maybe folder. Usually, anything that is not a top priority this week goes in there even if there’s an action I could take right now. (Basically adding priority to the criteria defining “actionable”.)

I only pull out a week’s worth of work at a time. E.g., even if the whole project is “move to Madrid”, this week’s list gets only “register for Spanish lessons”.

If I’m still overwhelmed, I focus down to a couple of days. If I can keep enough perspective on a bigger time slot, I expand.

Taking the opportunity of my summer break I was earlier this week reading again an earlier edition of Julie Morgenstern’s Time Management from the Inside Out. Her ideas on a time map seem to make a lot of sense in my view. Adequate timetabling might be going without saying with David Allen’s exclusive constituency, ie corporate business, but for the rest of us, it might be a very different thing.

My girlfriend was using her calendar as a todo list for quite some time. Like many of us though, interruptions and various curveballs meant that she had to regularly spend time moving uncompleted items forward. After seeing how much time she was burning just shuffling things around, I started pitching GTD.

One of the qualities of a good organizational system is that it shouldn’t demand a lot of additional work just to keep it maintained. I keep time-flexible tasks out of my calendar not because it is The Word Of David, but because he has good reasons for his advice and those reasons apply to the sort of work I do.

In addition to interruptions throwing me off, scheduling my work would be problematic because I don’t necessarily know how long each task will take. I’m a programmer and my profession still isn’t very good at time estimation. To make matters worse, some tasks are inherently unquantifyable.

To understand this, consider losing your car keys. How long will it take to find them? What percentage of the search have you completed? There is no meaningful answer. You look for your keys until you find them. Until then, all you know is that you aren’t done.

While scheduling all my todos is a non-starter for me, I do find the daily todo list to be useful. Some days I select a few items from my Next Action lists that I’m going to try to crank through over the next few hours. It is helpful to have a concrete goal to shoot for. If I’m not able to get through the whole list, that’s no big deal.

i have found using due date in outlook useful for creatig ‘today’s short list’ of tasks. Then i use the reminder time to set the time i am going to try and work on the task that day. this way it all stays in my task list (off my calendar) and I can use the outlook views like timeline or next seven days to see what is due this week. if i group by due date i any view, rescheduling due dates is as easy as dragging the task to the new due date group. this makes daily task shuffling/reprioritizing take only a few minutes and I’m confident my days short list contains everthing i need/can work on for the day.

Merlin: you allude to GtD patterns (eg, “get it all down???). Has anyone abstracted the GtD patterns in toto? That might be nice to see.

David. It’s always satisfying to see that someone has been thinking the same way as me. I’ve had the idea that GTD is a lot about patterns; maybe the wider stuff that Merlin posts is too? But “GetItAllDown” certainly has potential as a pattern, along with many other GTD techniques. Something like “SeparateCollectionFromProcessing” (only with a snappier name) would be another potential pattern. Many of the Life Hacks over on the 43F Wiki would also potentially qualify as patterns that people have tried and found to be generally applicable. Of course, there is also scope for describing GTD Anti-patterns too; things that people have tried as a possible solution to productivity problems, but in the end turn out to cause more problems than they solve. For example, an Anti-pattern could be “UseExpensivePDASoftware” (not that I’m bitter).

It strikes me that the 43F Wiki would be a good place to explore this further, if Merlin was amenable. The Unsorted Life Hacks section looks a bit like a prototype Patterns category anyway, and is always an interesting read in any event.

@tubbymike (and David)

Yeah I think that’s a great idea. In the back of my head I think “C2 wiki” when I talk about pattern stuff. (http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?CategoryPattern). I think it would be really valuable to sketch out how that might work on our own wiki.

If it’s not obvious yet, I’m personally not nearly as interested in canonical, candle-burning, hymn-singing GTD as I am in its underlying patterns. That’s where the gold is, IMHO.

Let’s maybe take this to the Google Group and talk it over?

Is this method really non-canonical GTD?

Somewhere, near the end, in David’s Epistle to the Geeks is a chapter on choosing/deciding what work to do at a given moment. In it he provides a spectrum of methods from planning out the day to letting it come one moment at time. It is not non-canonical to plan every minute of your day, nor is it non-canonical to put only meeting times and deadlines in your calendar.

The David points out that factors such as context, amount of time and one’s energy level should be considered in selecting your next action.

I use a blend, leaning to work on the “minimalist - hard edge” calendar approach. It allows me to consider other factors such as location/context and, more importantly, my energy level so I can select the appropriate next action. I like having the calendar only for marking out day/time specfic tasks. I like having the control to use the remaining time as I see best uses my resources and energy.

The underlying philosophy is to permit yourself to choose and do the right next action in the moment AND not to act on other next actions. This permission must also grant you the release of any anxiety that the other next actions may be dropped, forgotten or lost. Your trusted systems and workflow of collecting, processing, organizing, reviewing and doing stuff will ensure that those next actions will get their proper consideration.

Interesting…

There was a program I did a few years ago called Mission Control that has definite similarities to GTD that this take reminds me of — their chief difference to GTD is that everything is in the calendar. Essentially, “If it’s not in the calendar, it doesn’t exist.”

The idea is the same — get stuff out of your head. Have a capture tool you use throughout the day, review stuff at the end of the day. Stuff that’s not in your calendar goes into lists: “Not Doing Now” and “Never Doing Now” are two of them. “Not Doing Now” items eventually either make it into your calendar or into the “Never Doing Now” list.

The program I did — and I actually managed an event for them — was developmental at the time, and they’ve since probably made changes to some of the specifics, but it was damn good.

I suppose the biggest benefit GTD has got going for it is that it’s more “open source” in nature, with the kind of community that we’ve got going on 43 Folders and the Google Group.

Here’s their site: http://www.missioncontrol.com/index.php

If anyone’s interested, I know some of the management team members and could interview them to find out what they think of GTD, a community like ours, etc. Hell, might just do that for my own interests.

Anyone else heard of them, btw?

Heh. Mission Control marketing looks so much like GTD marketing that I suspect it’s aother of these GTD spin-off/schism/co-evolve/former partner thingies, like McGhee Productivity Solutions (former David Allen partner), or Timedesign (GTD antecedent, of which DA was once a trainer for.)

I suspect that DA may be intentionally or untentionally spinning off variant marketing schemes that will eventually result in wild success for the scheme that’s most fit to market demands, ala genetic algorithm design.

Luisa/Laura: schedule in time for interruptions then too. I’m a system adminstrator at a university, I basically support directly about 20 faculty and 65 grad students (we have 60 / 200 or so total, and the rest are “allowed” to talk to me too), as well as the occasional staff member question. Basically, I get interrupted a lot, so I know where you’re coming from - but if you allow some percentage of your time (only you can say how much is appropriate, but I go with 30-40%) for interruptions, I find that helps. I also schedule such that if I think a task will take me 30 minutes uninterrupted, I schedule it for 45 minutes or an hour. Not perfect, but it helps. I’ve also learned that most people don’t take it personally if you tell them “sorry, I can’t do that right now, but how about at 1pm?” sorts of things.

If they do take something like that personally, you’ve got problems that no amount of scheduling or GTD in the world can help you with.

There’s a great little free program that helps you schedule to dos into actual appointments — it’s called TimeTo and you can download it from download.com. It has lots of flexibility in the “Pro” mode, which is also free. I downloaded it just for fun one day to try it out and it has been extraordinarily useful in helping me figure out what to do when.

I’d think the main problem to overcome with scheduling everything is estimation. Knowing how long a chunk of work will take to complete is a HUGE skill to have.

Or maybe it just seems that way because I don’t have it yet. Practice makes perfect?

I think that in utilizing GTD, we should take a page from the notebooks of Bruce Lee. When he was developing his own martial arts form — jeet kune do — he took bits and pieces from different martial forms and used what worked for him. “Use what is useful, discard the rest”, I believe the quote went.

I have found a simply way to hold both “hard landscape” and time-flexible tasks in one calendar. All You need is to mark “hard landscape” with speical color (I prefer orange, but You feel free to use any bright color - yellow will be a good choice). You can use Evolution, SunBird or MozillaCalendar and make some new calendar file of orange color, or You can use KOrganizer and reserve “Meetings” category for “hard landscape” items (don’t forget to assign orange color to this category). I don’t know is Outlook allow to assign specified colors to different categories (I hate Outlook at all).

I keep my NA list electronically, but I start each day by printing it out, sorted by context. (If it takes more than one sheet of paper, it’s too big. Move stuff to Someday/Maybe.) Then, I use a highlighter to mark the top 5-10 things I want to do that day.

The list is all there, so it’s easy to blast through five low priority phone calls when I’m making the one important call. On the other hand, the highlighted items let me make progress without grappling with the whole list.

Works for me.

I started doing this in iCal. For some reason, I just block out the to-do list in the sidebar and focus only on the calendar. You can set a reminder, but if you put off the task you’re screwed.

Granted, I don’t have too much to do (sadly) and a Post-It Note would probably suffice, but scheduling a task makes me feel a little more useful.

The best to-do list I really have, though, is the amazing mousepad I found at the 99-cent store. It’s the shape of a regular mousepad, but it’s a huge pad of paper, so you can scribble things down and just tear off the top sheet as needed. (Bonus: It happenes to have the logo of my favorite NASCAR driver, Dale Jarrett.) I bought the last two they had. Old habits die hard….