[myotis]

Psidnell

I agree that todos and calendars should be combined. In the Windows world there are programs like Timematters, Achieve Planner, and a plug in for outlook that allow you to assign times to tasks or blocks of tasks, add appointments or other time constraints. The programs then semi-automatically juggle tasks to fit the available time blocks, deadlines and the times a task will take.

I used TimeMatters for years, and it works extremely well, but it requires too much on going management to get it to work properly doesn't have any mechanism to sync calendars except through Outlook,and of course is windows only.

How my paper system worked, which I was trying to emulate with OmniOutliner was based on planning a maximum of 13 days a month. I just did this as list with tuning total. The list included task longer than half a day, plus appointments, which were also almost always more than half a day.

Then depending on deadlines, I would juggle tasks between months, as new tasks were added. Moving tasks into a different month once any month had 13 days of time committed.

At the beginning of each month, I took these large chunks of work for that month only and assigned them to specific days and times. These major Tasks now became appointments with myself when I wasn't available for meetings, answering email etc.

All the minor and the must be done this month/week/day work was then managed as a normal todo list but fitted into times outside the timetables major task chunks. Which, although devised 20 years ago, was managed almost exactly as a GTD todo list, with contexts etc.

For example, I had a telephone chunk of time timetabled for an hour every afternoon, and built up a telephone calls to make list, which I worked through during that hour.

It all worked extremely well, but being paper based it involved much scoring out and rewriting. I am still looking for a computer based tool. Nothing I have tried works, all are either too simple or too complex.

Graham