[sriggs]

Thanks Brian

According to GTD, three things go on your calendar...
Time-specific actions
Day-specific actions
Day-specific information

The next action lists (OmniFocus) get the ‘as soon as I can’ actions

For ‘Charge the video camera’...
I placed this on my calendar the day before the ceremony from 8pm to 8:30pm which is usually a good time for me to do something like that. I set two reminders in iCal. One for 3 hours before and one for 15 minutes before to make sure I wouldn’t forget.

For ‘Pick up 3 family salads from restaurant’...
I placed this on my calendar just before the appointment for the ceremony and gave myself 30 minutes to get it done. The great thing about placing this on the calendar is that I have to consider how long it will take to get it done. It’s easy to not consider how much time things take when I’m looking at a list and I end up over committing myself and wind up late and frustrated. I wasn’t late to the ceremony because I had realistically planned out what I needed to do beforehand on a calendar.

The ‘Get 5 dollars cash from bank for Girl Scout dues’ was placed in my calendar for a thirty minute duration just before the salads task.

Now when I looked at my calendar for the day of the ceremony, I knew I had to leave an hour before the event to get all my prep stuff taken care of.

The day this actually happened, I ended up saving some time by picking up the salad and money on the way home from work so we didn’t have to rush out before the ceremony. I didn’t execute the events exactly as they were planned but the calendar allowed me to understand what needed to get done and how much time I had to work with and I was able to improvise a little to make my life a little easier. And that made me much happy. No frustrated Girl Scouts waiting in the car while daddy ordered salad.