How do you plan and track your daily activities, with a calendar or a to do list? Some productivity gurus claim that putting everything on your calendar ensures that it never gets done, or that you’ll cross off what you don’t get done and just reschedule it for the next day — which defeats the purpose of scheduling. Other gurus claim that putting everything on a list, where items aren’t tied to a time and date, ensures that they never get done, since they lack specific queues to get started or deadlines to finish.
If the choice is mutually exclusive, I think they’re both wrong. Calendars and lists are related, but serve different purposes, not unlike clocks and timers. You can use a clock as a timer, but it’s not the best tool for the job.
Calendar Management Best Practices
By far, calendars are the most popular way to manage tasks. Walk into any office supply store and look at its selection of day planners, and you’ll probably see most pages devoted to calendar entries, and one page per week devoted to tasks. The iPhone has a calendar, but no native to do list application; the same applies to Android phones.
But calendars are clumsy as to do lists. Weekly and monthly paper-based calendars offer limited space for entering multiple items, compelling the user to either leave off many otherwise doable tasks, or describe agendas in general terms that require further thinking to make them actionable.
A well-formed task list gives enough detail to get started immediately rather than just suggest a general course of action, which is usually an outcome disguised as an action: “Get refund” is an outcome; “Call customer service” is an action. Actions descriptions that granular will be greater in number than what can be crammed into a typical calendar blank.
When to Use Calendars
Even an extremely busy person should guard against having a cluttered calendar. I have plenty of things to do, but I strive to keep as much off of my calendar as possible.
The more items you have on your calendar, but more potential your schedule has for getting out of sync. If you’ve scheduled A, B and C in sequential order, then doing B implicitly depends on first completing A, even if there’s no relational dependency between the two tasks. By artificially putting tasks in sequential order, the margin for error for each one getting done directly impacts all subsequent tasks, creating what programmers call cascading errors.
Suppose your first task for the day is “Talk to Mark re product launch,” and your next task is, “Edit monthly report.” But it turns out that Mark’s not at his desk. After a few minutes of walking around the office to see if he’s lingering elsewhere, you go back to your own desk. Since he’s late, you decide to spend the time thinking about exactly what you need to go over when Mark arrives. It feels productive, since you’re still focused on what you “have to” do, but in reality, you being idle.
That’s because your calendar put you in a “Talk to Mark” frame of mind, even though the item wasn’t a scheduled meeting (he wasn’t aware of your intentions). After all, your calendar says you’re supposed to talk to Mark before you can do anything else. But editing your monthly report has no dependency on your discussions with Mark, or lack thereof. If the tasks had been on a list instead, you would have been more inclined to respond to Mark’s absence by looking at your list and asking, “What else can I do?”
So what should go on your calendar?
- Appointments (obviously)
- Objectively time-dependent or date-dependent events: a package that won’t arrive until Wednesday, a package you have to mail by the end of today, a trade show you’re considering attending (even optional events can be time-bound)
- Things you deliberately want to defer until a more appropriate time, such as holding off on buying a shiny new gadget until after you’ve paid your taxes
- Blocks of extended time for high-focus activities: writing sessions, batched phone call or email sessions, jogging
Leave tasks that don’t have a time dependency off your calendar. Avoid writing down artificial start times or deadlines for them, for two reasons: (1) to minimize the potential for cascading errors and (2) to plan for unplanned but inevitable interruptions.
Keeping an uncluttered calendar doesn’t mean doing less. Instead of using your calendar to see how much you have to do, you’re now using the whitespace in your calendar to gauge your availability. Availability for what, you ask?
Using Your To Do List
Some people think that not allocating a specific time to a task gives themselves too much rope. I’d suggest the opposite: that they’re wound too tight.
Untimed action lists could be seen as collections of items to do whenever you get around to them, but I look at my lists as collections of items to do as soon as possible (I structure my tasks into context lists, hence the plural references to “lists”). I review my lists the way most people review their watch.
“As soon as possible” doesn’t mean in haste. It means looking at my calendar for the first opening in my schedule, then using that whitespace to go to my lists and look for the highest leverage action I can take in that discretionary time. Discretionary time isn’t idle time. It’s time to review your list to see which task fits best in the window available, then doing it from start to finish, as opposed to scheduling a 12-minute task into a 30-minute slot on your calendar, and then “thinking about” it for the remaining 18 minutes.
Your calendar and list work together. If you’re booked solid with a day full of meetings with no gaps, you don’t have to look at your list, since none of those tasks are time-dependent, and therefore, by definition, can wait. If you only have a couple of appointments that day, you have a window of opportunity to blast through your list. When you reach the whitespace in your calendar, go into “list mode.”
Andre Kibbe
Andre Kibbe was the editor of the productivity blog Tools for Thought. He currently works as a content analyst for Internet Brands.
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Moleskine do a fantastic planner/journal where in the left page has a full week with enough space to write appointments and the right page has room for a task list and notes. It’s quite retro and analogue using this paper stuff, and it doesn’t beep at you when you need to do stuff but I find it invaluable for not only planning but keeping a record of things.
Wow
Nice article. I usually use special mobile calender software with remainder for scheduling. Calender is real need for business professionals. Thanks for sharing this nice post.
Nice post, I like to make use of both, financials (invoices/expenses) i prefer to use a calendar system and coding/design I prefer a list based system.
Well written. My vote goes for “To Do List”.
Interesting points inside the text.
Totally agree with your sentence:
“Your calendar and list work together.”
- I use for this Remember The Milk + Google Calendar and I am very satisfied with this combination.
Retweeted.
Regards,
John
This blog post definitely helped clear the air for someone like me who frequently falls into time wasting without having a clear idea of how to use the tools at hand.
I used to have tons of adjacent calendar “events” and find that most of them were undone by the end of the day. By adopting to-do list and using activity blocks in my calendar instead of creating an event for each task, I am now more productive than ever.
Hi Andre,
Great post – Very valuable info.
I thought I’d tip your hat to Tungle. A great add-on to any calendar…Here’s some info:
Tungle.me makes scheduling meetings easy–across organizations, calendar systems, and time zones. Tungle.me eliminates costly double bookings, frustrating time zone mishaps, and the endless back and forth emails and phone calls of finding a time to meet. Tungle.me is a free personal scheduling application that syncs with Outlook (with or without Exchange), Google Calendar, Apple iCal, Entourage for Mac and Lotus Notes. Tungle.me does not require meeting invitees or visitors to a user’s Tungle.me page to sign in or register to schedule meetings.
Tungle.me also supports scheduling meetings on-the-go with Tungle.me for iPhone and Blackberry
Totally agree! Calendars and To-Do Lists must be used together.
For me calendars are where scheduled meetings/trainings are logged, as well as deadlines. While to-do lists are things I need to do for the day but not necessarily as time-sensitive as those in the calendar. However, the stuff on my to-do list will definitely help me meet my calendar deadlines so it should all work out in the end.
I’m all for working smart!
Very nice article, thank you
I use the simple To Do list in the iGoogle page
But i am planning to make a simple web application (actually it will begin as a service for me & my friends in the college), so this article will help me alot
Really good article. It really provides a different kind of insight into getting work done. I never thought I had the need to maintain two different planners (calendars, and to-do lists). But now that I’ve read this, I might just change my mind.
I agree… so when are the good folk at Google going to give us sync for tasks rather than just Calendar and Mail?
I’m all for the GTD approach of
1. Keeping my calendar for appointments only
2. Dividing task list into contexts (I have lists called ‘interwebs’, ‘calls’ and ‘ikea’, for example.)
I have the pocket informant app on my iPhone and love it almost as much as life itself
Interesting that nobody has mentioned using a single tool that provides the ability to view your tasks in either a list view or a calendar view. I always used Outlook this way in the old days but found that I did not toggle my view that much.
Now I use Smartsheet.com (shameless plug since I work for them) to keep track of my to-do list in a list format (aka sheet view), and I can easily toggle into the Calendar view (or Gantt view) when I want to look at my tasks in that format.
Nice article, Andre,
You raised a good point, and I think whether a person prefers a list or calendar has a lot to do with how the person thinks. There’s so much variance in the way each of us process information that I’d be surprised that one of either of these two options get much more votes than the other.
I would also be curious to see some stats on who prefers software for their solution, and who prefers good ole paper and pencil.
For those who prefer software solutions, Worktime Studio offers both a task list and calendar interface. Of course, it isn’t a substitute for those that prefer paper and pencil, but provides a good alternative for those who like using software to organize their life.
And, just as there are those who prefer calendars or task lists, there’s even a further divide when choosing a software solution for your tasks and scheduling. Maybe that’s why there’s many good choices of software available in this arena, because one size does not fit all.
I used to just put all my classes, meetings, due dates, and other time-specific events in iCal, but then I would never actually open iCal and look at them, so things still wouldn’t get done. Now I still enter all those events, but I print out a weekly calendar and tape it to my desk. That way everything is there for me to look at, and then I can write in various things I want get done each day. Any random “if I get to it” goals usually go in a list on the weekend days, which are usually blank.
I built the service FollowUp.cc because of this evolution where my email has somewhat become my to-do list and my calendar in a sense (I call it my email calendar nowadays).
I can set followup reminder on emails, but also send notes for times I want to get things done and then snooze those for later if I something came up and I can’t get to it.
It’s nice to always have a clean inbox at the end of the day!
Good article. I only used to use Google Calendar for all my needs, but for a few weeks now, I started using Things on the Mac and iPhone, and I’m feeling a lot more productive and organized. I still put appointments and deadlines on the Calendar, but in the GTD app, I can organize it by lists, days, importance, and it’s really easy to see if I can’t do one thing, what shall I do next.
I highly recommend Things (mac+iphone) and Google Calendar. Awesome mix
Great article. I believe the best solution is a combination of both a calendar and a to do list, as well. I have tried to do just one or the other and definitely agree with you that they serve different purposes. I’ve finally just started to use both simultaneously and it has made a world of difference! It’s easy for me because everything I need/use is in one place. I use Toodledo for my list and a calendar/scheduler that is on my time tracking software, TSheets (http://tsheets.com). It’s so great to have everything I need for the day/week/month in one place online that I can access from anywhere!
I like the thought on this topic, but I think it seems like over planning! I use calendars for meeting reminders. Have a to-do list for work I need to do!
I think it is more important to realize the productivity cycle during the 8 hour work day. And work around that! Check out my views on the topic here:
http://www.thesimplemachine.com/work-productivity-cycle/
Nice article. I had been useing iCal for all my appointments and to do list items but have just switched to a combination of iCal and Things. Things is a fantastic to do list and you can sync it with the to do list feature in iCal. Both work great on the iPhone also.