This week, how do your task manager, calendar and notes fit together in a time management and productivity system?

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Episode 277 | Script

Hello and welcome to episode 277 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.

A frequently asked question is how does everything fit together? By that what is meant, is having three separate productivity tools too much for something as simple as being guided toward what needs to happen next?

On the surface it might well look like that. After all, why use three tools when one tool could do it all. Your calendar, could easily manage your appointments and tasks and quite a few task managers have tried this by integrating with the mainstream calendar apps.

However, what is missed is the ability to compartmentalise. To be able to quickly see the big picture of your day and then to drill down deeper to the micro level and make decisions about what you can or should be doing with your time at that moment.

So, that is what we will be looking at today and to get us started, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.

This week’s question comes from Andy. Andy asks, Hi Carl, I’m struggling to understand why I need to use a to-do list and a calendar. Everyone seems to talk about this but why not keep everything you need to do on your calendar and dispense with using a task manager?

Hi Andy, thank you for your question.

The truth is you do not need a task manager at all. When I began my time management journey, I used an A4 desk diary that showed a week over two pages. When open on my desk, that diary showed me the whole week at a glance.

At the bottom of each day, there was sufficient room to add a few tasks and that is exactly how I used it. Appointments in their allotted time and to-dos written out at the bottom of each day. It worked brilliantly for over fifteen years.

However, with that said, digital tools have made somethings a lot easier. For instance the digital to-do list allows us to create recurring tasks—tasks we would frequently forget to do. This way we can off load a lot from our brains into a digital system without feeling anxious about whether we will remember to do something or not.

However, why do we need three productivity apps when in theory one could do everything for us?

The biggest problem with having everything contained within one app is the overwhelm it will produce. Seeing everything on one page (and I mean everything) will prevent you from quickly seeing what is important and what is not. Generally, in the hierarchy of tools the calendar gives you the overview of your day. It tells you where you need to be at a given time. For example, if you need to collect your kids up from school at 4pm, that would be on your calendar. Similarly, if you have a meeting with an important customer at 1pm, you need to know about that and you need to see it in the context of your whole day.

With tasks, you likely have ten to twenty tasks to perform each day. These will include big important tasks, such as preparing for an important meeting with your boss, to smaller, less important tasks such as refuelling your car before an early morning start the next day. Preparing for the meeting and refuelling your car can be done at anytime in the day and in terms of priority, will be less important than being outside your kids’ school gates at the correct time. (I hope)

If you were looking at a list of all your appointments and tasks for the day, it’s going to look overwhelming—even on the easiest of days. You will have important and not important tasks all mixed up together and being able to quickly distinguish what you should be doing will be challenging.

Instead you can look at your calendar as showing you the big picture of your day. It tells you where you need to be with who and when. It’s a quick reference tool in that you can glance at your calendar and see instantly where you should be next and when. It’s not overwhelming because it only shows you your events and blocks of time where you can do the smaller tasks.

Your task manager is the micro-level of your day. It shows you, at a micro-level, what needs to be done. For instance, today, I have a task reminding me to call into my dog’s vet to pick up some anti-tic tablets (it the tic season here in Korea). This task can be done at anytime as the vet’s clinic is a twenty-minute walk from my home. I’m not going to schedule that as I can do it anytime up to 6pm and I know I will need a break at some point in the day and I can do it then.

My task manager also shows me all the little routines I should do today. From clearing my actionable email and updating my business tracking spreadsheets to scheduling my social media. I do these everyday throughout the day and it’s helpful to see what I have and have not done when it comes to closing down my day.

Your notes is something different. This is a tool that has always been used, whether keeping these in notebooks or on bits of paper, we’ve always kept notes and they have been separated from our productivity tools. As far back as Leonardo Di Vinci or Isaac Newton, notebooks have always been where we kept thoughts and ideas.

In our productivity toolbox, notes are the support for your projects and ideas. You only need these when working on a particular piece of work. The great thing about digital notes is they are searchable and that is where they have a huge advantage over paper notes. It means less time filing and searching.

The key to having all these tools working effectively is in how you use them. I recently looked at replicating my old paper-based desk diary system in my digital calendar and it works exceptionally well—which really shouldn’t have surprised me as it’s simple. The only issue I had was not being able to cross completed tasks out. It was either the task stayed at the top of my calendar or they disappeared, which meant I did not have a record of what had been completed. However, in theory the system would work.

However, the issue of overwhelm raised its head again. Seeing all my appointments and tasks in one view is just not a pleasant experience. It dilutes your attention and will cause you to cherry pick easy tasks just to clear some space. That’s not the more effective way to do your work.

Instead, what I have found works best, is to use tags (or labels) to correspond with my focus work time blocks. Let me give you an example of how this works. On a Monday I have a two hour block on my calendar for writing between 9:30 and 11:30am. In my task manager, I have a label for writing. When I plan my day, all I need do look at my writing tasks for that day and decide which one I will do.

I am not being distracted by emails I may need to respond to—I will do that in my communications hour later in the day—or if I need to do any project work. My calendar tells me I am writing for two hours between 9:30 and 11:30 and as long as I respect my calendar—and after all, I was the one who decided I would be writing at that time—then I know each day I will be working on the right things and not being pulled off onto less important, but perhaps louder tasks.

And that’s an important point. Your calendar is your creation—or at least should be. When you get a calendar invite, you don’t have to accept it. You have a choice: accept, decline or maybe. If the invite clashes with a focus block time, you need to have the courage to stand your ground and request an alternative time. A quick tip here, when suggesting an alternative time, always offer two times. You increase the chances the other person will accept your offer of another time with that technique.

Now if your calendar is “compulsory”—at least once you have finalised your calendar for the day it should be, your task manager is discretionary. Never get upset if you do not complete all you tasks for the day, but hold a full blown investigation if you ignore your calendar.

The reality is, there are too many unknowns that could happen in the day—particularly if you are working with other people—you may begin the day expecting a meeting with an important client, only to find they had to cancel and ask for another day and time. Suddenly the meeting you were going to have this afternoon in another part of the city is cancelled. Now you have three hours, you didn’t expect. What are you going to do? That’s where being able to open up your task manager and bring a few tasks forward is helpful.

It’s quick, and you can quickly rearrange the appointment knowing the important things you had planned for that week will not be interrupted if you have to rearrange a meeting.

Now, I should point out, none of this will work if you are not doing any weekly planning. If you’re not planning you will always be working on the latest and loudest. You will never look at the big picture, and you will always feel overwhelmed. The weekly planning sessions are all about giving you some breathing room to look ahead, see what’s heading towards you and making decisions about what you should be working on.

Not everything is important and a lot of what we think we should be doing will, given time, sort themselves out. But, you will never know what those are without doing a plan for the week.

So, there you go, Andy. I hope that has helped. Thank you for your question and than you to you too for listening. It just remain s for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.

Scott Selberg, "Mediating Alzheimer's: Cognition and Personhood" (U Minnesota Press, 2022)