Is your calendar overcrowded with appointments and things to do?
Does it get frustrating when something gets missed, because your day just DIDN’T go the way you planned?
No matter what kind of calendar you use, its main purpose is to keep track of scheduled appointments.
But too many professionals are also using their calendar for manage TASKS. And they don’t belong there.
We get bombarded with dozens of little tasks every day. To manage these, you might be using legal pads, post-it notes, a planner, a white board, an excel spreadsheet, or a notebook—in addition to using a calendar—to keep up.
But sadly, NONE of those tools—including the calendar—is the MOST effective way to keep track of tasks. These will fail you when trying to plan and prioritize tasks, and they will seriously hold you up when trying to make steady progress.
To manage tasks efficiently and effectively, tasks must be in place—a system or a list—where it’s EASY to manage them. To do that, it must be CENTRAL, DIGITAL, and COMPLETE.
Let’s just focus on the “complete” part.
When tasks are on your calendar, it means your task list isn’t complete, wherever it is, and you’ve just made your job of planning and prioritizing a LOT harder.
This creates a fragmented approach to managing tasks, where the calendar is just ONE of many places to look for the tasks you need to do. If a task isn’t on your calendar, that means it’s waiting somewhere else in some other tool for eventual action.
Like most tools, a calendar will never be the complete or all-inclusive system for managing tasks. There are usually FAR more tasks in a person’s realm of responsibility than can fit into a day, a week, or a month on the calendar.
Plus, tasks come in rapidly and often, and they must be planned and prioritized with great speed, agility, and precision. You can’t do that on a calendar. Especially if you can’t SEE them all in one day or week, and they’re hard to find among the appointments.
Here are 4 BIG BENEFITS to avoid putting tasks on your calendar and instead put tasks into ONE central, digital, and complete system.
- LESS CLUTTER, MORE TIME
Two, five, or ten-minute tasks are NOT time-specific. When you put these little tasks on your calendar simply to remind you to do something—when in reality it doesn’t matter what time you do it—it just clutters up your calendar and skews your sense of true available time.
When someone wants to schedule a meeting with you, now you have to study your calendar to distinguish the REAL scheduled appointments from the random tasks taking up space, which is a BIG waste of your time.
When appointments are on a calendar and tasks are on a task list, you’ll be crystal clear about exactly where you need to go and exactly what you need to do, without the two categories mixing.
- POWER TO REPRIORITIZE
You may have the BEST of intentions to get something done, but in the chaos of the day as it flew by, you may have skipped over some tasks, knowing they weren’t urgent. (They may have nagged you all day, but you still may have skipped over them.)
Now what? What’s your process for handling the tasks that you didn’t do? If you forget to go back and review your calendar, those tasks can be easily forgotten, which means trouble down the road. Missed or forgotten tasks often have ugly repercussions.
When tasks are ALL in ONE, reliable task system/list, it’s easy to see them, compare them, and make fast decisions about what to do or not do—which will happen often.
Remember that your daily plan for getting tasks accomplished is fluid. You’re always going to be reprioritizing as new tasks come up. With a single task list, you’ll have more power to track, plan, and prioritize tasks, which means you have the power to change your mind without missing, losing, or forgetting anything.
- CONTINUOUS PROGRESS
Let’s say you just left a voice mail for someone you were trying to reach? Now what? How will you manage the follow-up with all of the pertinent details?
In another scenario, what if you begin a task, but you get interrupted and don’t finish? How are you keeping track of the details about what you did or didn’t do, and when you plan to return to it?
Unfinished tasks, follow-ups, and task details can be easily forgotten, which causes progress on projects to slow down. This also can cause reactivity in your workday and challenges in the future.
When you have a true task system/list, each task will have a “notes” section. That’s where these details belong. When you don’t finish a task, you can easily choose a new day to pick it up again, knowing you have all the details to dive in without wasting time to backtrack.
- NO NOTIFICATIONS
Do you Snooze the pop-ups that remind you of tasks you put on your calendar?
Reminders are GREAT for calendar appointments, but NOT great for tasks. Reminders are PUSH notifications that are highly disruptive. They show up at times when you may not be ready or able to take action.
This means you’re not getting these tasks accomplished, but you’re also not planning them for another day in case today’s not the day.
A real task system/list gives you a plan of action you can PULL from when you’re ready to work on a task. It gives you a place to see all of your tasks and plan action on the right days, so you can accelerate achievement, save time and energy, and make more meaningful progress on what matters most from day to day—and well into the future.
