What doesn’t get scheduled, doesn’t get done
If there is one aspect of Getting Things Done® where David Allen is not particular explicit then it is about scheduling time for your todos. While he suggests to put actions which need to be done by a certain date on the calendar, he propagates sticking with your lists for everything that you want to get done.
Over the years people working with GTD® and focussing on personal productivity have identified this flaw and developed a best practice. The most popular one is likely the concept of MITs (Most Important Tasks) introduced in Leo Babauta’s Zen to Done GTD® variant. But even with our daily top tasks identified, we tend to be way too optimistic and ambitious given we need to deal with emails, phone calls, meetings and other interruptions throughout the day. As a result we find ourselves disappointed or even frustrated with the lack of progress when we close our shop in the evening.
The solution, an obvious one, is to schedule time not only for the things you need to do, but also for those that you want to do. Patrick Rhone elaborates extensively about the dilemma of tasks lists and time in his ’A Time For Things’ post.
Planning Your Day With OmniFocus
This practice has also grown on me and I extended my workflow for planning my daily actions to include scheduling time for them. I still start with my OmniFocus Planning Perspective picking the tasks I want to engage in for the day which are then summarised in my Today Perspective.
Then I use a feature of OmniFocus which not many are aware of: I simply drag each tasks I want to do and drop it into Mac OS X’s Calendar app.
This way I get a fairly realistic feeling of what I can get done between the various meetings and phone calls I have throughout the day. I typically then need to realise I have picked a few tasks too much, but I can simply unflag them and they disappear from my Today Perspective and go back to Planning.
The Drag’n’Drop functionality is not perfect: It ignores the estimates, if you made any in OmniFocus (I do not) and defaults to an appointment duration of 1 hour. But since you would typically only schedule 4–5 big tasks for the day, adjusting the duration is not that time consuming. There is also no link back to the task, but it actually gives me fulfilment to go to my OmniFocus Today Perspective, find the task in the relative short list and check it off.
A few words of caution
Schedule bigger, i.e. more time consuming tasks only. Scheduling half a dozen of short duration tasks (< 10 mins) is not exactly creating a useful calendar view. I keep these tasks, which are typically part of my ‘Short Dashes’ Context, out of my calendar. If you still like to schedule time for them I recommend putting a placeholder like ‘Short Dashes’ or ‘Admin’ into your calendar instead and batch process them then.
Ideally you plan your day the night before and schedule tasks accordingly. This way you eliminate the planning at the start of the day, giving you more of this high energy morning time to just get going with things.
Lastly, do not be too hard on yourself if you still do not complete all the scheduled tasks. There are more interruptions than we think and also our own estimates of how long it takes to complete a piece of work are substantially flawed. As a rule of thumb you can take your worst case estimation and multiply it by 2.5 to get closer to reality.
But if you did not get to complete a task, just schedule it for the next day and keep it flagged in OmniFocus so it remains part of your Today Perspective as well.
Find all of my OmniFocus posts in my ‘Essentials’ collection. If you like to master OmniFocus, I really recommend the excellent ‘Learn OmniFocus’ learning platform as well as the pragmatic ‘Working with OmniFocus’ video tutorials.
