We usually prioritize… and then we schedule the things we've prioritized, so that we can do them.
That's a good workflow—and it's fairly evident—but I've seen so many people, armed with a list of to-do's, totally sidestepping any form of structured scheduling, according to time.
Many people (including myself once upon a time) thought/think we can get away without scheduling. It's doable, but it's not ideal. The best way I know how to schedule in WorkFlowy, is through the daily-planner time blocks. This chapter lays out a handful of the pluses of using the daily planner. Everyone can benefit from this – even if you're the boss of you and you have a super flexible day.
There are many more prioritization methods than you and I thought existed. Many of us have heard of the Eisenhower Matrix, Eat That Frog! and the 1-3-5 rule… but then we have others, such as: the Pareto Analysis, the MoSCoW, RICE, ALPEN, Cost of Delay and Forced Ranking methods, the Value vs. Effort Matrix, the Three D's (Do, Delegate, Dump), Lean Prioritization, the SWOT analysis, etc.
Using the Eisenhower Matrix can help analyze tasks so that we can figure out what is truly important… however, without ultimately scheduling tasks, it's just an exercise in tinkering.
The Eat That Frog method involves tackling your most difficult or unpleasant task first thing in the morning, so that you can get it out of the way and focus on other tasks for the rest of the day. While it's a great concept that may work well for many people, it might not be possible to tackle the most unpleasant task first thing in the morning… or it might not even be the best use of your time. If you have creative juices flowing in the morning, that period might best be set aside for knowledge work.
You see, it's really easy to overthink our priorities and second-guess ourselves… but, when you engage in scheduling, you'll see that it is a prioritization method all on its own… and I'll even go so far as to say that it's a superior prioritization method to any other concept you can find.
Scheduling and prioritization techniques serve different purposes. Prioritization techniques may help flesh out what is important… but scheduling gives you a clearer picture of how your day could shape up.
You can certainly lean on prioritization methods, but let me make a case for primarily focusing on scheduling as a way of shaping your day.
The timeline bridges the gap between organization and scheduling your to-do's.
Many people primarily use WorkFlowy to categorize and think… and they don't see WorkFlowy as a task management app. So naturally, they will be drawn to a separate app that takes care of scheduling their to-do's – such as Todoist, TickTick, Notion or Trello.
I see this time and time again with the many WorkFlowy users I've coached.
The timeline is that missing piece of the puzzle. It allows for the seamless organization of everything in life AND the scheduling of those things. The moment you make this connection, suddenly doing your organizing, thinking and scheduling in one app takes on a new perspective: it's suddenly possible… and it's effortless to manage.
Some people even get as far as hashing out their weekly planning in WorkFlowy… but they don't close the gap with that final step, and do their actual daily planning in WorkFlowy. They stop just shy of setting up a daily planner. The daily-planner time blocks are crucial. This is where it comes down to doing the things that your timeline/tickler file has so conveniently surfaced for you. Don't stop short of the finish line. Go all the way and set up your scheduling in WorkFlowy as part of the timeline continuum.
Having a set of time blocks in WorkFlowy has all but eliminated the host of prioritization methods that I've cycled through over the years.
When you use a set of time blocks, you don't consciously think that you're engaging in prioritizing… but you actually are.
Running your life on a timeline requires that you prioritize. If you're organizing according to time, you're constantly engaging in prioritization as you push and pull items. Prioritization becomes part and parcel of scheduling.
You can hold on to the concepts that certain prioritization methods have taught you… but the primary modus operandi is now shaping your day according to the time that you have.
A lot of people I've spoken to don't want to be locked into a "rigid", "inflexible" system. They equate time blocks with the scheduling of calendar events – and it feels as if they're locking themselves into a fixed commitment with everything that is assigned to a block of time.
I don't see it that way. It's not so much a rigid, block-by-block approach to one's day. I see it as more of a playground—a sandbox—that allows me to shape my day any which way I want. – and I'm free to push all tasks (but the most important) out of the way (to the future), if needed, so that I can focus on the essentials.
Your daily planner is part of the very same push-and-pull Kanban dynamic you have with your calendar – which allows you to limit your work in progress and push to the future anything that might be in the way of focusing on what you determine, at any given moment, to be the most important thing.
The ability to shuffle items around in WorkFlowy is unprecedented… so let's apply that to a daily planner. This gives us amazing fluidity, as we're able to shuffle and move items around just as we would anywhere else in WorkFlowy. WorkFlowy gives you the movability—across a series of time blocks—that no other app can do as seamlessly.
Once you've transferred the items from tomorrow's date in your calendar into your time blocks, you could see that as the first draft, if you prefer.
The time blocks merely allow you to see what is possible to take on today. It's a tentative ordering of the items that you have actively chosen to bring into your workspace for today. You get to size your tasks up one against the other… and if it doesn't feel like a good fit, you get to reshuffle and rearrange:
• If there's not enough time to commute from point A to B, you can add some more buffer time or reschedule events.
• In your mind's eye, you can picture how it feels moving from one task to another, and whether that makes sense. You might be too mentally drained to do one task directly after another. You might be too physically exhausted going directly from one task to the next… and so what you can do quite effortlessly, is reshuffle your tasks in relation to one another, so that it all makes sense and feels like a good fit.
Scheduling through juxtaposition (according to time blocks)—by comparing the nature of your tasks—allows you to think in terms of physical and mental energy. It allows you to look at periods of your day and see where your energy predictably fluctuates, depending on the spectrum of all you've got going. So you can do a second and a third draft if you'd like, until you're happy with the shape of your day.
The great thing about a set of time blocks, within which to schedule and prioritize, is that you can create a to-do list based on how much actual time you have in a day, and not how many things you imagine you could get done.
When you populate your daily-planner time blocks, you'll immediately be able to see whether you're taking on too much… whether you've got plenty of time to spare… or if it looks just right. This way, you're never going to attempt to do ridiculously more than you have time in the day to do – with half a dozen ever-present tasks hanging over your head—and which will inevitably be left undone—making it feel like the day was a failure, productivity-wise.
If you've got more items in the next day's time bucket in your calendar then you can possibly get done, this will be plain to see when it comes time to populating your time blocks. And so, instead of scheduling a handful of tasks that you know will not get done, you push the not-so-important items ahead in your timeline to the next logical, reasonable or opportune place. And here begins your journey of discovering how much can fit into a day, a week and a month. The timeline begins to show you whether you're overly ambitious… or whether you're overestimating or underestimating with your time estimates. The timeline is a good teacher. But more importantly, it allows you to pivot, think on your feet, and change plans. It allows you to easily push and pull those tasks which are important, and those which are peripheral.
Even if your day is totally flexible, and you get to do anything your heart desires on a typical day… still, the time blocks help you to squeeze the most out of your day.
Oftentimes, my main issue is not a lack of focus… but more so, that I'm focusing too long and hard on one thing.
I have the tendency to focus on one thing to the exclusion of everything else – especially the important things in life. When you schedule in those important things, this gives you a bit of a breather, and allows you to have more balance in your day. Life consists of more than projects and productivity. We've got people to love and a physical body with blood running through our veins. The phrase, "Too much of a good thing is bad for you" is no more true than being so productive in one area, at the expense of family, friends, health and rest.
While I get that some folk do not want to be encumbered by a schedule, it's a schedule that helps us to be more productive and lead a more balanced life. You don't have to micromanage your time, but at least set aside blocks of time—periods of your day—to do the important things. This is the value of the daily planner.
Often, I have to stop and remember that the thing I'm working on is part of a marathon. It's going to take a couple of months to complete anyways – so let's pace myself, and not put the rest of life on hold.
If tasks are piling up and becoming a source of anxiety on any given day—because you can't complete them in the remainder of the time you have at hand—push the less pressing tasks into your calendar (tickler file). That's what it's there for. Despite our best efforts to predict what we can actually do in a day, often we're going to take on more than we can get done in a regular day. That's fine.
You now have a system and a few dynamics that allow you to push items forward without feeling like something is going to fall through the cracks and get overlooked. And you don't get the sense that it's an exercise in procrastination. It's all in a day's work, and it's all part of the inevitable and necessary restructuring and regrouping that befalls all of us. It's part of life. And the timeline helps us to get a better handle on life.
This is mainly a side note, because the timeline as a whole makes it intuitive enough to cut way down on overscheduling. And our daily planner, in particular, allows us to see how much time is actually available for today's tasks.
It takes just a minute or two to at the end of the day to transfer things from tomorrow's bucket in your calendar, into timeslots for the next day. It's a fully manual affair. And it gives you full control.
Manually moving your items gives you the opportunity to sculpt your day from scratch.
Sculpting your day from scratch will often give you the sense that certain routines and events can shift and change if need be. This is helpful if you'd like to squeeze something more important or adventurous into your schedule.
By dragging and dropping things from your calendar into your time slots for the next day, you get to make split moments decisions… you get to think of possibilities… you get to ask yourself, "Does this really have to go here in this specific timeslot? How do I fit this other thing in that I'm really wanting to do?"
The uniformity principle →Workflowy is a minimalist note taking app that helps you organize your life. Simple enough to hold your grocery list, powerful enough to hold your entire life.
by Frank Degenaar