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!