When Should Tasks Live on My Calendar?

00:00:00.000 | [MUSIC]

00:00:05.440 | We have a quick deep dive today on yet another practical question.

00:00:10.560 | When should tasks live on my calendar?

00:00:15.760 | Now, if you've heard me talk about my varied productivity systems before,

00:00:22.480 | you know that the obligations in my life I tend to keep on task boards.

00:00:27.120 | I use the tool Trello. I have a different task board for each role in my professional life.

00:00:31.440 | I have one card for each obligation. Relevant information is attached to the card. The cards

00:00:37.200 | are sorted under columns that dictate the status or category of that obligation.

00:00:42.480 | All right, and that's all fine. I look at those when I do my weekly plan. And in theory,

00:00:48.560 | I have admin blocks during the week where I go and look at those task boards and pull out the

00:00:52.960 | appropriate task. And this is all good. You don't want these to exist just in your head. That's a

00:00:56.080 | good place to keep them. However, there's a non-trivial fraction of my tasks that actually

00:01:02.960 | do not exist on that task board, but instead on my calendar. I use Google Calendar. So typically,

00:01:11.120 | they will exist for me on a given day as what's known as an all-day event. So it's a little

00:01:15.840 | event that appears just at the top of the day, not at a particular time.

00:01:20.560 | So the question is, what type of tasks do I put on my calendar instead of my task board? Well,

00:01:26.960 | to help answer this question, I have actually loaded my calendar in front of me. I did not

00:01:30.400 | prepare for this. I'm doing this on the fly. I have my calendar right here in front of me.

00:01:34.560 | I'm going to go back in the future and back in time a little bit. And let's just look at the

00:01:38.960 | type of tasks I have on my calendar. All right, so like today, I had a scheduling task. There's a

00:01:47.520 | medical appointment I needed to schedule. I couldn't schedule it too far in advance,

00:01:53.040 | and there was a note on my calendar for today to do that. And I did schedule that today.

00:01:58.480 | Let's see what else we have on here. Plan. Okay, so there was a change to our podcast recording

00:02:09.440 | planning. So at some point, I knew the day that we were going to record, that Jesse and I were

00:02:16.240 | going to be in the studio wasn't going to work. And I put a note on my calendar to come up with

00:02:20.480 | an alternative plan and talk to Jesse about it. So that was something that was on my calendar.

00:02:24.800 | Okay, I'm looking at real calendars here. Posting a problem set. This was last Wednesday. The new

00:02:30.240 | problem set for the students in my class at Georgetown has to be posted. Check with our admin

00:02:36.640 | about these graduate student TA job advertisements. So I had posted this information, or she was

00:02:44.480 | posting this information, and I had put a note on my calendar to follow up with her on given

00:02:49.360 | information. Let's find one more here. Send slides for a speaking client. Send them slides.

00:02:56.480 | All right, so what do these examples have in common? In all of these cases, there's

00:03:01.760 | their tasks, what I know when they need to be executed within a several day period.

00:03:09.360 | Like send slides. That's the day either that they're due, or I know it's the next day I have

00:03:15.200 | time to actually get those slides together. Follow up with our admin about those TA job

00:03:21.600 | posting announcements. Well, I knew when I sent all that information in that I should follow up

00:03:26.880 | in a week. So it was very time specific. Let's wait a week and then follow up on what's going on.

00:03:31.360 | That's why that existed on that particular day. Post the problem set. That actually had to happen

00:03:36.720 | on that day. I post them on the specific days. It's listed on the syllabus when they're posted.

00:03:40.640 | So it's a reminder that this is the day that problem set is going to be posted. I mentioned

00:03:44.560 | before the schedule, the podcast, schedule the podcast, plan, change. You know, my vague memory

00:03:52.880 | is that it came over the transom, the thing that was going to interrupt our schedule, but I was in

00:03:57.120 | the middle of a bunch of things. But I knew it was really important. So I put it on my calendar,

00:04:01.200 | like this is what I should do first thing Monday. And the final example I gave was scheduling this

00:04:05.600 | medical appointment. You could only schedule two weeks out. So I remember when I figured out,

00:04:10.240 | okay, I need to schedule this for the beginning of December. I went to my calendar to what's the

00:04:15.440 | day I'll be able to do that. Okay, let me put the note there. So in all of these cases, these examples

00:04:19.200 | I just took from my real calendar of tasks that exist just on my calendar, and not on my task

00:04:24.960 | boards, they were all things that needed to happen within a relatively specific window.

00:04:30.720 | Having them on the calendar, I think is a really reasonable way of doing it. Because for me,

00:04:36.800 | like a lot of knowledge workers, the one thing I know is going to be looked at all day long

00:04:40.400 | is my calendar, because I have a lot of appointments and meetings and talks and whatever.

00:04:44.400 | I got to look at my calendar, or I'm just hosed. There's no there's no way I can not look at my

00:04:49.280 | calendar, I could go a day or two without looking at my task board, I'd be fine. If I go a day

00:04:53.360 | without looking at my calendar, I'm going to miss five things. And so that's like not a bad place

00:04:58.240 | for it to be. Second, the second advantage of this is that it's well suited for weekly planning. So

00:05:03.600 | when it comes time to do weekly planning for a week, you look at your task boards, you look at

00:05:08.160 | your calendar, but your task boards, you know, there's lots of things on there. But when you

00:05:11.520 | look at your calendar, the tasks that are living on your calendar for that week have now been

00:05:16.480 | highlighted, underlined flashing, these have to happen this week.

00:05:21.840 | When you're thinking of your weekly plan, you then integrate those things into your weekly plan,

00:05:27.120 | now you probably would see it in your task board when you're going to your task board for preparing

00:05:31.280 | for your weekly plan. But there's a lot of things on your task board. And you know, you might miss

00:05:35.760 | it that I had this thing really probably should happen this week. Or in some cases, you know,

00:05:40.000 | it could happen whenever but you've decided I really want to get this done before the end of

00:05:43.440 | the month. So let me put a note on a particular week. There's a psychology here, where you feel

00:05:49.600 | better about this thing, this will get taken care of, it's time sensitive. I always look at my

00:05:54.320 | calendar, I do my weekly plan, I look at my calendar every day, this will not be forgotten,

00:05:57.680 | this will be taken care of. The step back, there is nothing fundamental about this strategy. In

00:06:03.840 | other words, there's nothing that just looking at your task board at the beginning of each week,

00:06:08.240 | pulling out the things that are due that week, having a good admin check in most days, all of

00:06:11.680 | that on paper will take care of all of these issues. But I feel a lot better. I feel a lot

00:06:17.760 | better to have the stuff that is time sensitive, actually live on my calendar near those times,

00:06:21.760 | it's a two tier system, there's a time sensitive task and the semi non time sensitive tasks,

00:06:25.840 | they exist in different worlds. This balance seems to work well for me. Again, I would probably be

00:06:30.720 | fine without the calendar in if that's a word, probably be fine. But I do get a lot of psychological

00:06:37.680 | comfort knowing that that problem set that needs to be posted that plan that needs to be changed

00:06:41.520 | right away. And that medical appointment that has to be made, knowing that that will 100% be seen

00:06:47.600 | and get executed when it needs to be executed.

When Should Tasks Live on My Calendar?

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