Quote:
Originally Posted by Brian
I tend to pile too many events into my Fridays, as well. It's just so easy to type into those date cells. :-)
I deal with that by doing mid-week mini-reviews, using a perspective set up this way in the perspective window:
View Mode: Context
Restore: Focus, Layout, Expansion
Focus: <my work-related contexts>
Context Sidebar: Remaining
Group by: Due
Sort by: Due
Status: Remaining
Duration: Any
Flagged: Any
This gives me a window with all my due actions (available or not) visible, sorted and grouped by due date. The "due within the last" buckets are open in the outline, as are "Due yesterday/today/tomorrow" and "Due in the next week". Everything else is hidden.
I use this view as a sort of "week at a glance". I'll selectively move things up from the "Due in the next week" bucket if I'm ahead of the game, or if tomorrow looks like I'm going to be swamped, I'll see if I can push things off.
For me, a couple of mid-week corrections help smooth out the bumps in the road. I can't often predict what Friday will look like on Monday, but my guesses on Wednesday or Thursday have a much better success rate.
Works for me, but by no means perfect. I can see how my approach would bug the heck out of someone that preferred a set-it-and-forget-it approach to scheduling, for example. :-)
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Thanks Brian - I just set up this perspective and it works great, never thought of doing it this way before.
As for the discussion, I very rarely use due or start dates anymore, I found that when I did set them a lot they tended not to get done anyway based on "the daily fires that need to be put out". The "fires" are not my making by the way, but from all those around me that don't use GTD or OF, but end up on my desk non-the-less. I found myself constantly changing the dates and finally gave up since it was just wasting a lot of time and causing to much stress.
Those actions that I know I am not going to start for awhile (based on resources, etc.) I will assign a start date to just so I don't have to look at them on my lists. Projects that I am not going to do right away get put on Hold and stored in a Parking Lot folder that gets reviewed every week. Things that have a "hard" due date get put on my calendar shown on the day they are due, I then also put them in OF with a due date set for the day that I need to start working on them in kind of a drop dead way. In other words, if some thing is due Friday and it will take me a full day to complete it will be on my calendar for Friday and in OF I will make it due for Thursday. I have my "due soon" set in OF for 2 days, this way that task will show up as due soon in OF on Tuesday/Wednesday giving me plenty of warning that I need to get it done.
I have very few things that have hard due dates so I'm fortunate that way.