Planning with a Calendar? This Advice Will Skyrocket your Productivity!
“Skip the task list and use your calendar to plan your work” is popular advice given to busy knowledge workers. While planning with a calendar does have advantages, it does not work in practice and therefore is bad advice. Instead of planning with a calendar you should follow the Incremental Time Planning method described below. This will boost your productivity and make you happier.
1. The Calendar Planning Method
“Skip the task list and use your calendar to plan your work” is popular advice given to busy knowledge workers. But how does it work?
1.1. How does the calendar planning method work?
When the advice was given to me, I did not know how to actually implement it. So I read every time-planning guru that talks about this planning method and now know its implementation, which has the following process:
● Split projects and large tasks into small actionable tasks
● Estimate the time of these smaller tasks
● Put those tasks into the next week calendar
● Work only on the tasks in the calendar and block out everything else
1.2. Benefits of the calendar planning method
The reason why the calendar planning method is recommended is to avoid working on task lists that never get done. Task lists not getting done is indeed a serious problem that most of you will have experienced. Why does it happen?
First, we put too many tasks into our task list. Second, because we have a stream of new incoming tasks that prevents us from getting to the tasks we had planned originally.
The calendar planning method does in fact help in the following ways:
● As you estimate time, you are more likely to put into your tasks list or calendar only as much work as you can realistically accomplish.
● As you have to split projects and large tasks to smaller tasks, you become more aware of all the tasks that are involved.
● As you are putting tasks into a time slot, you plan both your week as well as your day, and thus it’s easier to focus on only those tasks, and neglect all other tasks.
2. The Calendar Planning Method Does Not Work
Despite the benefits listed above and despite the common problems with task lists, using a calendar to plan your work does not work in practice, at least not for 90% of the people trying it out, and therefore is bad advice.
I have tried the calendar planning method myself and have interviewed many others who have tried the method but unfortunately we all had similar experiences. While we wanted to make it work, we just could not because of these problems:
● Many urgent tasks cannot be planned in advance
● Calendar gets too messy
● Not flexible enough
● No distinction between fixed-time-tasks and flexible-time-tasks
2.1. Many urgent tasks cannot be planned in advance
With the calendar method you have to assign exact timing and scheduling of tasks a week in advance. But a week in advance you can’t foresee the tasks that will be coming at you over the week. While it would be nice to just neglect these incoming tasks, it is often impossible or at least not advisable to do so. So you are quickly forced to rearrange the schedule of your tasks many times during the week.
Unfortunately, If you have to postpone one task you will have to put it into a timeslot that was already assigned to another task, which you then also would have to postpone, so that in fact you might have to postpone all your tasks!
2.2. Calendar gets too messy
When you have to put each task into the calendar, the calendar quickly becomes messy. This is especially true if you split the tasks into smaller subtasks. Let’s imagine you have split your projects into small tasks of 10 minutes each. Of these tasks you might have 50 a day. Are you really going to put 50 different appointments into your calendar?
Now imagine that one task takes more time, let’s say one hour instead of 10 minutes. That would mean that you would have to reschedule not one but a lot of tasks. Practically the entire calendar for delayed tasks. This works like a pile of dominoes, meaning tasks being delayed causes the next one to delay etc.
2.3. Not flexible enough
Planning your whole week ahead with every task planned according to the minute does not give you enough flexibility. While it is important to get the things that you planned done, and not get distracted by other work, it is OK and in fact necessary to keep flexibility.
For example, maybe electricity stops working so you can’t work on your computer. In this case you want the flexibility to reschedule a task that does not need your computer.
In summary, the tasks you want to accomplish during the week and during the day should be set in advance, but the exact scheduling does not need to be planned one week in advance!
2.4. No distinction between fixed-time-task and flexible-time-tasks
Finally, when you put all your tasks into the calendar you have no more distinction between tasks that are really time bound because they are appointments (fixed-time-tasks) and tasks that are time flexible (flexible-time-tasks).
That leads to the time bound tasks being less visible and therefore easier to lose sight of.
For all the reasons explained above we strongly advise against using a calendar for planning your work and only use it for scheduling fixed time tasks like appointments, birthdays or hard deadlines.
However, we are well aware of the many benefits that planning with a calendar can bring:
● More accurate planning of workload due to time estimation
● Knowing what to work on in the week due to fixed weekly and daily tasks
● Stop delaying tasks due to fixing task date
So the question is, “how can we get these benefits without having to put tasks into the calendar?”
3. The Incremental Time Planning Method Does Work
The Incremental Time Planning method has many similarities to the calendar planning method but it does not have the same impracticalities. These impracticalities mainly come from the fact that you have to determine one week in advance the exact schedule for each task on all days of the week.
The Incremental Time Planning method instead has four phases of planning:
● Planning in general for the month at the start of the month
● Planning in general for the week at the start of the week
● Planning for each day in the morning
● Planning of the execution order during the day
3.1. How does the Incremental Time Planning method work?
The Incremental Time Planning method has the following implementation process:
● Spit projects and large tasks into small actionable tasks (same as in calendar planning method)
● Estimate the time of these smaller tasks (same as in calendar planning method)
● At monthly planning, select the tasks to be accomplished during the month
● At weekly planning, select the tasks to be accomplished during the week
● At daily planning, select the tasks to be accomplished during the day
● During the day, schedule and reschedule your tasks
● Work only on the tasks in the daily schedule and block out everything else (same as in calendar planning method)
We can thus compare the two methods as follows:
As you can see from the above table, the only difference (highlighted in red) is that instead of putting the tasks into the calendar, they are put into:
● A monthly plan
● From the monthly plan into a weekly task list
● From the weekly task list into a daily task list
● From the daily task list into the daily task schedule
A task schedule shows the execution order, i.e. what tasks to work on next, but it is not time bound as a calendar.
We can illustrate the above planning process as follows:
In order to work well, the monthly task list, weekly task list, daily task list and daily scheduler have to be automatically synced, which can be done by a tool called Workiamo, to be found at www.workiamo.com.
3.2. Incremental Time Planning method and our productivity system
The Incremental Time Planning method uses the 3 core concepts of the Focus Cycle Work System:
● Goal Pyramid
● Focus Cycles
● Time & Analytics
3.2.1. Goal Pyramid
“Goal pyramid” means that projects and bigger tasks have to be split into smaller tasks that are actionable. It also means that these actionable tasks need to stay related to the bigger tasks and projects.
3.2.2. Focus Cycles
“Focus Cycles” means that you split the tasks into time periods of months, weeks and days and in each time period only focus on executing the planned tasks.
3.2.3 Time & Analytics
“Timing & Analytics” means that you estimate the duration of your tasks, then track your work time and analyse the analytics on your performance.
The steps in the Incremental Time Planning method are difficult to do with just pen and paper. A software tool could help, but unfortunately there was no tool available to implement this planning process. For that reason we have developed a software to be used with the Incremental Time Planning process, called Workiamo.
Workiamo is a very simple tool that is ideal for anybody that wants to be less stressed and more productive. As you are reading this, we let you access it for lifetime for free! In order to do so, you have to register at www.workiamo.com by entering this code: ILOVEWORK.
3.3. Benefits of the Incremental Time Planning method
The Incremental Time Planning method has all the advantages of the calendar planning method but none of its disadvantages.
So the benefits are:
● More accurate planning of workload due to time estimation.
● Knowing what to work on in the week due to fixed weekly tasks and fixed daily tasks.
● Stop delaying tasks due to fixing the task date.
In addition, you will be more productive, have less stress and enjoy work more.
