#Todoist calendar update

The time you spend planning will be more than made up with improved flow, reduced procrastination, and a better choice of tasks.Īlright, lets get to some actionable stuff! Add in a few minutes for making adjustments throughout the day. With a few days of practice, planning your day takes about 10 minutes. If planning our day takes 4 hours but only saves us 30 minutes, we’ve wasted our time.įortunately this process is quicker than you’d think. You end up making better choices about what’s important when you use both a calendar and a todolist. They force you to make decisions about what end up on your tasklist for today. The boundaries of time are frustrating, but empowering. The calendar says: “You thought you had 6 hours to work, but look at all these things you have scheduled, you really only have 4 hours today” It’s like making a budget, but with your time instead of money. The real power of a calendar comes when you use it to combine your todo-list with the reality of time.Ī calendar is a big reality check: you only have this many hours today. This is where calendars come in to work their magic. You aren’t being realistic with your time. Get better at eliminating the inessential, at choosing what’s most important, at saying no. It’s a sign that you’re taking on too many tasks. If you keep pushing todo items to the next day, it’s not a sign that you’re unproductive. You can keep adding tasks and new projects with no limit. We are all given the same number of hours in a day, but a todolist has no way of indicating that. Why is this so common? Because todolists are not good at rectifying tasks with the amount of time you really have. Look at some of the biggest complaints people have: “my list is too long”, “looking at it feels overwhelming”, “I have too many things to do!” Todolists are awesome, but they can break down too. You can break down large projects into subtasks, and keep everything organized. Many people use either a todolist or calendar.Ī todolist is excellent at collecting and organizing actionable tasks. If you can, I’d highly recommend one of the following: If you don’t have a todo-list and a calendar in place, the rest of this article won’t be very helpful to you. With appointments, meetings, and everyday routines already scheduled

Gives enough breathing room to be flexible, and to seize opportunities when they arise.įor a daily planning system to work, we will need:Ī list of well defined projects and a breakdown of actions needed to accomplish those projects.

Assigns the right balance of immersive and process time.

Reduces chaos and uncertainty throughout the day.

Enables increased focus on our most important work.

Sets us up for a day of clearly defined tasks, and when to do them.

But first, let’s lay out what’s necessary for a great daily time management system. Later, I’ll show you step-by-step how I plan my day. The plan might adjust and flex throughout the day, but there’s a plan.

Now when you reach an impasse, you don’t have to think. Have your next actions laid out in front of you. The better way is to plan ahead and schedule your day. Surely this will force you to do the work?īut this isn’t fixing the underlying problem: you stopped because you didn’t know what to do next. The common advice is to block social media, or unplug the internet, or move to a cabin by a lake. Thinking about the next action is hard, so we don’t do it in the moment. Your brain would rather default to another immersive, rewarding state, like scrolling through reddit. Switching from an immersive flow state, to a more cognitive planning state, takes some context switching. In the moment, you should’ve picked the next action instead of picking which website to check.īut thinking about the next action is hard. You were on a roll, and then your brain shut off. You find yourself checking facebook, twitter, email. You’re unstoppable.īut then you finish an action, and you’re not really sure what to do next. The work is stimulating and you feel like you could do this all day. Have you ever been in flow? Each action comes smoothly, step-by-step. The philosophy I outline in this article meshes well with Sunsama.

#Todoist calendar update

Update Jan 2020: I now use a tool called Sunsama instead of the workflow described below.