Tasks vs. time-bound commitments

This might be mind-numbingly obvious to you, but it wasn’t to me.

The best way to handle tasks is with a to-do list. And the best way to handle time-bound commitments is with a calendar.

Trying to blend them or using one tool to do the other’s job is unlikely to be effective.

For the longest time, I’ve used my calendar app as a de facto to-do list—in combination with my inbox. (Even worse!) Yes, and it has not been working for me.

Here’s an example of how that’s a problem:

1. I have “make appointment to change car to winter tires” as a yearly recurring to-do in early November.
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2. But, this year, there wasn’t a drop of snow in sight at that time.
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3. So I didn’t do it.
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4. Thus, it dropped off my radar. (The date having passed, the notification having slipped to page 2 of my inbox.)
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5. And so we didn’t get our winter tires on until after 2 weeks of snowy weather. This led to missed trips and a fair few white-knuckle drives when we had to go somewhere, and it was slippery.

All because I used my calendar as a to-do list.

If I had used a proper to-do list app, the event would have rolled over to the next day and the next until I did it.

And I owe a huge shout-out to Jonathan Stark for this.

His Ruthlessly Simple Time Management webinar helped me realize this was the problem. (There was a LOT more to the webinar, so I’m not giving anything away that I shouldn’t.)

Tasks are for to-do lists; Time-bound commitments are for calendars.

Simply,
James

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P.S. The webinar is now taken down, as promised in the post I linked to above. But Jonathan covers a lot of what he talked about in this episode of his The Business of Authority podcast with Rochelle Moulton.