Scheduling my life
In the comments to a different entry, a reader asked for details on how I keep track of all the things I have to do. I wrote the following as my answer, then realized that it might be interesting as its own blog post:
My task tracking is a multifaceted system that has grown out of years of applied trial and error. It would probably confuse anyone else who tried to use it, but it works for me because the system and my life have grown around each other.
In my kitchen I have a big wall calendar which displays the entire year. The space for each day is small, so only the major events get written down. I don’t write down when the kids go to school, because that is normal. I do write down if they have the day off, or when they have after school activities. I have a different color of pen for each child. This allows me to tell at a glance the general shape of the day/week/month. This calendar is the one I consult when trying to figure out if an event will fit into our schedule. This poses problems when I am away from the house and I need to schedule an appointment. Enter my franklin planner.
The planner has monthly calendar pages that I keep up to date with the big wall calendar. At least once per week I try to make sure that all items are on both calendars no matter where they were originally written down. More detailed information about each individual day goes into the daily pages. Writing things down in there can get tedious, but the process actually seems to help organize the tasks in my brain, so I have not switched to an electronically based system. Each day gets a full page and here is where I assign all the small tasks of the day and check them off. I can also assign tasks to future days and then forget about them until I get to that day. The planner is used extensively when I am stressed or busy. When life is slower, I just use the calendar on the wall and track the remaining few things in my head.
Even the planner information is sometimes too generalized. I will write “XDM layout” which schedules a block of time, but doesn’t remind me which layout tasks I intended to tackle within that block. Enter my high-tech system of post-it notes stuck to my desk and the hutch above it. These help me remember where I left of working and serve as reminders of random bits of information that I’ll need again. I also use my email inbox to help me remember things to do. For example the notification email about LJ comments remind me that I want to respond to the comments. Things only stay in my inbox if I need to do something about them. The drawback to this is that when my inbox fills up, I start to feel stressed because it feels like I have dozens of tasks on my to-do list.
When life is busy (which is every day lately) I start each day by glancing at the wall calendar to get a general sense of the day/week. Then I go through my planner to see what specific tasks there are to tackle each day. After the kids are at school, I sit down at my desk. This is when I glance through the inventory of post-it notes, discarding any that have become irrelevant. Then I comb through my inbox and resolve things there. Then I can start working for real instead of just organizing the work.
When I write it all out like this it sounds like a tediously complex system, but as I said before, it is what has grown out of my experiences. Other people probably have much more streamlined systems. Howard tracks his tasks all in Outlook on his computer. Of course he also benefits from my efforts on the wall calendar and planner, so perhaps that is not a fair comparison. When all is said and done, I prefer to have some redundancy and the manual transfer of information from one place to another. It helps me to wrap my head around the schedule and to make sure that tasks don’t fall through the cracks.