Quote:
Originally Posted by pumblechook114
One thing that Allen has actively advised against (and which I still have trouble with) is the idea of artificial deadlines. If you remember, this is the section in the book where he broke down the traditional daily to do list, arguing that this leads to unnecessary stress when things inevitably come up and you can't do everything on that daily to do list.
I'm like you -- I wish I could have my calendar tell me exactly what I'm supposed to be doing at any given point in the day. But this isn't as helpful as you might think. I found this article on fixed schedule productivity very helpful:
http://calnewport.com/blog/2008/02/1...of-work-hours/
In the spirit of this, here is how I use the calendar and OF without those artificial deadlines. First, think about your areas of responsibility that are fairly fixed and don't often change. Then, think about how you want your daily schedule to look, taking into account long term commitments, your goals, etc... For me, this might look like this: 6am - 8am, Get ready and get to work, 8:30am - 9:30am, daily review and follow-up, 9:30am - 12:30pm, website projects, 12:30pm - 1:30pm, lunch, etc...
Scheduling in blocks of time on your calendar for your areas of responsibility helps to focus on only those projects/tasks in OF related to that area of responsibility. For me, this takes out the guesswork when you look at a laundry list of tasks because you've already set aside time on your calendar ahead of time to make sure your major areas of responsibility are being tended to. You might create perspectives for each of these areas that are easily accessible for each respective block of time. |
The daily to-do list, putting tasks on the calendar, and artificial deadlines are not as heretical to GTD as many make them out to be. The
best practice is to avoid these things since for
most people it causes them to stress needlessly about deadlines that aren't real and numbs them to the real hard deadlines on the calendar.
But it's not the only practice and it's not an issue for all people. The key is being able to rapidly renegotiate any agreement you've made with yourself to assign a deadline to something. That's where something like the Defer script for Omnifocus (discussed elsewhere) can be really helpful because it allows you to, with a couple of keystrokes, say "Not today, maybe tomorrow."
So if you look at your calendar a lot (say you go to a lot of meetings) and you need due dates and/or blocked time to get certain things done, feel free to put them on the calendar or assign a due date as long as the edges are sharp enough (say a different color on the calendar or flagging instead of a due date) that you will not become numb to the distinction.