Calendering vs Task Management

There are some programs such as the Things app for the iphone/mac that coordinate tasks and Evernote for everything that work to manage tasks and notes. Whichever you choose I've found that these management systems don't really do much for calendaring. I've had good success in just separating the calandering system from the task management system.

Task management inherently seems to involve things that I need to do at some point. Most of the apps/information out there is based in some part on Getting Things Done by David Allen who somewhat advises breaking out tasks into things that you do immediately, things you do sometime and things that are involved in projects. I've seen alot of applications that copy this like the aforementioned Things app as well as Egretlist that integrates with Evernote. Usually there is a Today bucket, a Next or Someday bucket and a project bucket that can coordinate tasks with specific projects. I've found that introducting order and calendaring (GTD also talks about this) just ends up making tasks fail as you either have to re-add tasks you didnt get to, procrastinated, etc. It's nice to have a task system that just rolls over the today tasks that didnt get completed.. so it stays in your task cache until you get around to it.

For calendaring, I use Outlook. The main reason currently is that my wife also has outlook at work and if you're working in and out of work email all day, its really convenient to have the calendaring tool that will integrate with every device AND my lovely wife is familiar with. We've gotten in the habit of scheduling ever single thing that needs to happen. We'll mark the event as personal and then invite each other. We'll accept the invitation if we're going and mark tentative if we aren't. This keeps our calendars in sync and seems to work really well. (It gets rid of the "I had no idea you had a tennis match!" problems).

The other nice effect of using separate systems.. is that scheduled events that don't require action are out of your "Have to do" stack. Once you schedule.. you're done.

I also schedule reoccurring tasks in oulook, like Flea Meds etc, as they are time sensitive, and I dont want to think of them till the day. The problem with this though is if I don't complete the task on the day, its effectively lost. So far though there aren't that many of these.. and these would be the only tasks I may transfer over to my task management solution to track if I forget on the day they are due. I still think having this exception is far easier that trying to make a task management app do everything Outlook Calendar can do out of the box.

Happy Producing!