A to-do list feels like one of those things that almost everyone on the planet has, be it an old school one handwritten in a paper notebook or some kind of app.
Personally, however, I don’t have any kind of conventional to-do list. Instead, for decades now, I’ve been in the habit of using a calendar as my to-do list, and here are the reasons you too might want to give this a try …
When it comes to task management and to-do lists, there are literally dozens of different systems out there. Getting Things Done, Bullet Journal, PARA, Eisenhower Matrix, Ivy Lee, Eat the Frog, MITs, MoSCoW, 1-3-5, Kanban … I could go on.
I’m a systems kind of guy: organizing stuff is basically a hobby to me. I could absolutely go down any of these rabbit holes and try organizing my life in any of those ways. Instead, however, I long ago came up with a simple yet highly effective approach which I’ve used ever since.
It happened after I’d been staring at a very lengthy set of categorized to-do lists and wondering when on earth I was actually going to be able to complete them. I decided the solution was to look at them in priority order, work out roughly how long each item was going to take, and then schedule each in my diary.
That approach achieved two things. First, the things I really needed to do got scheduled and then done. Second, I got to see just how unrealistic it was to complete all of the items on my lists, so I was forced to delete the ones that simply weren’t going to happen.
After that, I decided to cut out the middleman and simply schedule each task as soon as I came up with it. That is, I decide when I’m going to do it and schedule it in my calendar for that time slot. I’ve used that system ever since and highly recommend it.
Of course, life doesn’t go perfectly to plan, so I sometimes need to reschedule things, but that’s just a case of dragging an item from one time slot or day to another.
I also use a series of color-coded calendars to give me a visual overview of my day, week, or month. I’ve written about this before, so you can read more about that here.
Here are all the reasons I would recommend giving this system a try …
I’m not dependent on color coding, exclamation marks, priority codes, or anything else to indicate that an item is either urgent or a high priority. I simply assign those items to an early time slot.
Less urgent or important tasks may be assigned later time slots, but there is still an assigned time and date for them. That means items don’t just languish somewhere on a dusty list but actually pop up as calendar alerts in a time not assigned to anything else.
I think we all have this fantasy self that can leap tall to-do lists with a single bound. The reality, however, is that we are all mortal with limited time in which to achieve things. Since nothing can get added to my to-do list without having a time slot in which I intend to do it, it’s far more difficult for me to overextend myself.
People talk about work-life balance, but I think there are all kinds of ways in which our lives can become unbalanced. Are we spending enough time on our passion projects? Personal development, physical and mental? Contributing to our communities? Having fun?
Using color-coded calendars, and having all time expenditure visible in one place, provides a simple visual overview of that balance.
The Reminders app does play one small part in all this for me. If I’m in bed or on the move and suddenly remember something I need to do, I will ask Siri to set a reminder for a specific time the following day. The reminder will now appear in my calendar in that time slot exactly as if I had scheduled it manually.
What’s your approach to managing your projects and your life? Do share in the comments.
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