We have a quick deep dive today on yet another practical question. When should tasks live on my calendar? Now, if you've heard me talk about my varied productivity systems before, you know that the obligations in my life I tend to keep on task boards. I use the tool Trello.

I have a different task board for each role in my professional life. I have one card for each obligation. Relevant information is attached to the card. The cards are sorted under columns that dictate the status or category of that obligation. All right, and that's all fine. I look at those when I do my weekly plan.

And in theory, I have admin blocks during the week where I go and look at those task boards and pull out the appropriate task. And this is all good. You don't want these to exist just in your head. That's a good place to keep them. However, there's a non-trivial fraction of my tasks that actually do not exist on that task board, but instead on my calendar.

I use Google Calendar. So typically, they will exist for me on a given day as what's known as an all-day event. So it's a little event that appears just at the top of the day, not at a particular time. So the question is, what type of tasks do I put on my calendar instead of my task board?

Well, to help answer this question, I have actually loaded my calendar in front of me. I did not prepare for this. I'm doing this on the fly. I have my calendar right here in front of me. I'm going to go back in the future and back in time a little bit.

And let's just look at the type of tasks I have on my calendar. All right, so like today, I had a scheduling task. There's a medical appointment I needed to schedule. I couldn't schedule it too far in advance, and there was a note on my calendar for today to do that.

And I did schedule that today. Let's see what else we have on here. Plan. Okay, so there was a change to our podcast recording planning. So at some point, I knew the day that we were going to record, that Jesse and I were going to be in the studio wasn't going to work.

And I put a note on my calendar to come up with an alternative plan and talk to Jesse about it. So that was something that was on my calendar. Okay, I'm looking at real calendars here. Posting a problem set. This was last Wednesday. The new problem set for the students in my class at Georgetown has to be posted.

Check with our admin about these graduate student TA job advertisements. So I had posted this information, or she was posting this information, and I had put a note on my calendar to follow up with her on given information. Let's find one more here. Send slides for a speaking client.

Send them slides. All right, so what do these examples have in common? In all of these cases, there's their tasks, what I know when they need to be executed within a several day period. Like send slides. That's the day either that they're due, or I know it's the next day I have time to actually get those slides together.

Follow up with our admin about those TA job posting announcements. Well, I knew when I sent all that information in that I should follow up in a week. So it was very time specific. Let's wait a week and then follow up on what's going on. That's why that existed on that particular day.

Post the problem set. That actually had to happen on that day. I post them on the specific days. It's listed on the syllabus when they're posted. So it's a reminder that this is the day that problem set is going to be posted. I mentioned before the schedule, the podcast, schedule the podcast, plan, change.

You know, my vague memory is that it came over the transom, the thing that was going to interrupt our schedule, but I was in the middle of a bunch of things. But I knew it was really important. So I put it on my calendar, like this is what I should do first thing Monday.

And the final example I gave was scheduling this medical appointment. You could only schedule two weeks out. So I remember when I figured out, okay, I need to schedule this for the beginning of December. I went to my calendar to what's the day I'll be able to do that.

Okay, let me put the note there. So in all of these cases, these examples I just took from my real calendar of tasks that exist just on my calendar, and not on my task boards, they were all things that needed to happen within a relatively specific window. Having them on the calendar, I think is a really reasonable way of doing it.

Because for me, like a lot of knowledge workers, the one thing I know is going to be looked at all day long is my calendar, because I have a lot of appointments and meetings and talks and whatever. 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 calendar, I could go a day or two without looking at my task board, I'd be fine.

If I go a day without looking at my calendar, I'm going to miss five things. And so that's like not a bad place for it to be. Second, the second advantage of this is that it's well suited for weekly planning. So when it comes time to do weekly planning for a week, you look at your task boards, you look at your calendar, but your task boards, you know, there's lots of things on there.

But when you look at your calendar, the tasks that are living on your calendar for that week have now been highlighted, underlined flashing, these have to happen this week. When you're thinking of your weekly plan, you then integrate those things into your weekly plan, now you probably would see it in your task board when you're going to your task board for preparing for your weekly plan.

But there's a lot of things on your task board. And you know, you might miss it that I had this thing really probably should happen this week. Or in some cases, you know, it could happen whenever but you've decided I really want to get this done before the end of the month.

So let me put a note on a particular week. There's a psychology here, where you feel better about this thing, this will get taken care of, it's time sensitive. I always look at my calendar, I do my weekly plan, I look at my calendar every day, this will not be forgotten, this will be taken care of.

The step back, there is nothing fundamental about this strategy. In other words, there's nothing that just looking at your task board at the beginning of each week, pulling out the things that are due that week, having a good admin check in most days, all of that on paper will take care of all of these issues.

But I feel a lot better. I feel a lot better to have the stuff that is time sensitive, actually live on my calendar near those times, it's a two tier system, there's a time sensitive task and the semi non time sensitive tasks, they exist in different worlds. This balance seems to work well for me.

Again, I would probably be fine without the calendar in if that's a word, probably be fine. But I do get a lot of psychological comfort knowing that that problem set that needs to be posted that plan that needs to be changed right away. And that medical appointment that has to be made, knowing that that will 100% be seen and get executed when it needs to be executed.