In the professional workday, just about everyone uses a Calendar. Most people use a digital calendar in their email system that can synchronize with their phone or tablet. Wall calendars are certainly still is use, and other paper calendars appear as part of the “day planner” that some professionals still tote around.
No matter what kind of calendar you use, it’s purpose is to keep track of scheduled appointments. These include, but are not limited to meetings, calls, conferences, lunches, holidays, days off, vacations, doctor’s appointments, and other personal and professional events.
However, there is ONE item that a Calendar is definitely NOT meant to manage—and that is a task.
Why? For a LOT of reasons. But first, let’s start with a little background about tasks.
Tasks are more than plentiful in the workday. You deal with a constant bombardment of emails, phone calls and texts—often containing tasks and producing follow-ups. Tasks also come from social media, meetings, hallway conversations, and visitors. Tasks are also represented by the papers and files sitting on your desk and when you create a to-do list on paper, it becomes yet another source of tasks. It’s a tool, yes, but now it’s also a new source.
All in all, there are more than ten different sources of tasks in the typical workday.
And for many professionals, keeping track of these tasks is tough to do. Maybe you feel that way, too?
You may question… What’s the best tool do I use? How can I keep track of everything? How do prioritize them and get them all done on time?
In an attempt to stay on top of things, you may do what most professionals do and simply keep checking and reviewing the many sources of your tasks to find the new ones while still trying to keep track of the ones you already knew about.
To manage tasks, you may try to juggle them in your head or on paper to-do lists, and you might use a calendar, too. But sadly, none of these are the MOST effective ways to keep track of tasks, nor are they the best methods for efficiently managing and accomplishing them.
You may not realize this—and most professionals don’t—but it’s actually IMPOSSIBLE to efficiently and effectively plan, prioritize, and accomplish tasks by trying to manage them ONLY from their sources without missing, losing or forgetting something—or a LOT of things—every day. So what’s a professional to do?
The first and most important thing is this: DON’T put tasks on your calendar.
Here’s why…
1. Tasks on a calendar creates clutter and wastes time.
A calendar shows you where your time is committed: where you need to be and at what time. A calendar is meant to help you only manage scheduled appointments as stated earlier. Tasks are in a different category.
Tasks are NOT time-specific or schedule-specific, and they don’t belong on a calendar except on very rare occasions (and there are a few.)
Therefore, when you put tasks on a calendar simply to remind you to do something, when it really doesn’t matter what time the task is accomplished during the day, problems will emerge.
When properly stated, tasks are small action steps that can be accomplished in 5, 10 or 15 minutes. Some may take 2 minute and some up to 30 minutes, but most are short, and putting them on a calendar will only clutter it up and skew your sense of committed time vs available time.
Tasks on your calendar will clutter up your view and someone wants to schedule a meeting or a call with you, you’re left trying to interpret your calendar. Now you have to distinguish the REAL scheduled appointments from the tasks taking up space at random times, and that’s just a big waste of your time.
You should know at a glance EXACTLY where your time is TRULY committed and where it’s not—WITHOUT having to waste time studying your calendar.
When your calendar is FREE of tasks, you can instantly understand where your time is committed and available, with no interpretation necessary and without spending any extra time to figure it out.
2. The tasks you DIDN’T do can be lost.
When a task goes on a calendar, there is no true commitment to accomplish it. And as many people know, doing a task AT ALL on any given day is optional.
You may have the BEST of intentions, but you may not be able to get to all of the tasks you put on your calendar. You may have honored the REAL scheduled appointments, but in the chaos of the day—as it flew by—you may have skipped over some tasks, knowing you had choices. These tasks might nag you all day, but you still may not do them.
Now what? What’s your process for handling the tasks that you didn’t get to?
If you use your calendar for managing tasks, have you ever forgotten to go back and review the days showing tasks you didn’t accomplish? This is a HUGE productivity pitfall, since missed tasks and forgotten follow-ups often have ugly repercussions.
3. Follow-ups can be forgotten.
What if you do a task, but now there’s a follow-up to the original task? Let’s say you make a phone call that was showing as a task on your calendar. You made the call, but you didn’t reach the other person. You had to leave a voice mail.
Now what? Again, without a process to follow, how are you managing next steps and follow-ups? And where are you going to put that step with all the pertinent details?
4. Tasks started, but not finished can be forgotten, too.
Many tasks will lead from one step to another. These multi-step tasks can sometimes proceed from day to day or week to week. Once you take the first step, the next step will be apparent and you may take next steps on different days.
If, however, you begin a task, but get interrupted or you simply didn’t finish, how do you handle the continuation of that task? How are you keeping track of what you did or didn’t do? How are you keeping track of the details and where you stopped if you got interrupted?
Details can be easily forgotten and tasks can go unfinished, causing slower progress and bringing new challenges in the future.
Again, without a process in place to handle these details, the calendar is a poor choice to try to manage tasks.
5. A calendar cannot be an all-inclusive system for tasks.
A calendar CAN be an all-inclusive system for scheduled appointments, because it’s meant for managing these. Outside of adding last-minute appointments or handling last-minute cancellations, your schedule is fairly set for the day. The decision to add a NEW appointment is merely a question of how much time you can afford to give among currently scheduled appointments for the day, week or month.
However, a calendar CANNOT be an all-inclusive system for tasks. Managing tasks needs a different approach.
Tasks come up much more rapidly, more often, and in higher quantities, and these must be managed with greater speed, agility and precision. Not only this, but there are usually FAR more tasks in a person’s realm of responsibility than can fit into a day or a week on the calendar.
Just as calendar appointments must be scheduled out, tasks also need to be planned for action on future days. But most professionals don’t use the calendar this way for all tasks and because of this, many tasks are left OFF of the calendar and are waiting somewhere else for eventual action.
This creates a very FRAGMENTED approach to managing tasks, where the calendar is just ONE more place to look for tasks to be accomplished on top of the other tools you might use, such as legal pads, planners, notebooks, post-it notes and more.
Plus, many tasks are left at their sources, such as in your email Inbox, on voicemail, in social media, in teams applications, in project software and more.
But again, trying to plan, prioritize, and accomplish tasks by managing them ONLY from their sources—and using multiple tools—is IMPOSSIBLE to do without missing, losing or forgetting something. It’s a very inefficient and ineffective way to manage tasks, and it wastes a LOT of time.
6. Progress stalls when tasks get “snoozed” on a calendar.
Do you set reminders for tasks on your calendar? If so, I’ll say, “Uh oh…,” because that can cause problems for your productivity and progress.
Those reminders are a PUSH mechanism. They are disruptive. And they will most likely come up at times when you are not ready or able to take action. So, you SNOOZE them. And then they’re at risk for not being accomplished at all.
Reminders are GREAT for calendar appointments, but they’re NOT great for tasks.
They become interruptions that get snoozed throughout the day because they’re hitting you at all the WRONG times. And that means there is no real progress on these tasks since there was no real plan of action for making sure they got accomplished in the first place.
To sum it up, tasks are NOT best managed where they are all spread out—decentralized and scattered—at their various sources and in or on various tools—and especially on your calendar.
To properly manage tasks—efficiently and effectively—they must be centralized in ONE digital system that’s meant for managing tasks.
This ONE system—”Mission Control”—is the BEST way to view all tasks to prioritize them for action on different days. It’s the only easy way to manage ALL tasks, no matter the source or when you’ll take action.
And when your day changes and priorities shift—which will happen often—you can reprioritize as necessary very easily and turn on a dime—WITHOUT missing, losing or forgetting anything.
Having tasks in a system designed for managing tasks—and NOT on a calendar—allows you to efficiently and effectively plan, prioritize and accomplish tasks, 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.
