I chuckled all of the way through the rest of the article because you’re right, that is an under-explored topic I just hadn’t thought about. Nice observation and thank you for the bright spot in my day.

I wish large corporations would upgrade Outlook to the 2010 version which has the to-do bar you can keep open constantly to help with productivity (drag and drop tasks etc.) … Many companies are still running 2003 and I miss the to-do bar. Thanks again for your voice here, it’s great.

We’re both focused on the same goal but have different strengths.

Feel free to reach out to me to set up a time to connect.

To your brilliance!
Elizabeth Grace Saunders

You do an excellent job of understanding how to optimize technology for time management.

To your brilliance!
Elizabeth Grace Saunders

On to your question: your experience mirrors that of mine, and everyone else who has tried this approach — at least in terms of the actions that are required. We’ll get to your feelings in just a moment.

Hate to say that as far as I can see, there is no escape from the scenario you described. Stuff changes, and decisions need to be re-made, and everyone does it tens of time each day. As professionals, we are called upon to juggle time demands endlessly, and with 24-7 communication tools like smartphone-email, we do it all the time, with increased frequency. This is an inescapable reality of professional life.

The primary choice you have is whether or not you’ll do your juggling in your head, or somewhere else. If we buy the idea that doing it in our heads is stressful, painful, etc., then for most of us, “somewhere else” translates into some kind of electronic tool.

I have written a few posts here at 2Time Labs about the awful design of the tools that we have at our disposal… and even wished for some kind of magical futuristic tools like the one seen in the movie “Minority Report.” The best tool I have seen is one on an iPad that’s also mentioned here on the blog. http://www.2time-sys.com/2011/07/06/a-manipulate-able-calendar/

But… I don’t have an iPad, and I use Outlook and a Blackberry and I yearn for a time when I won’t have to struggle with the limitations of what I have, as Dezhi Wu described. In her book, she almost sounds shocked and outraged that we don’t have better tools, because even the common-sense stuff like linking time demands as you Project Managers take for granted in Gantt charts still remains as “rocket science” in most calendar systems. Imagine having to change every single task in Microsoft Project _manually_ when one date slips… that’s analogous to what we are forced to do in Outlook.

“Unwieldy, time-consuming and enervating” are mild words compared to the ones I use when I fight with my calendar software to do simple things, let alone the stuff that it SHOULD be able to do, based on common sense.

Sadly… I don’t have much immediate comfort for you. There might be practices that you can change, but I suspect that you are at the mercy of awful design options. Of course, you can go back to using lists. I tried that at one point, and it only made things worse as my poor head struggled to deal with the mental processing required by using lists to manage a high volume of time demands.

I recently migrated from using a Tungsten T to a Blackberry 9700 and that has helped tremendously. Having a synched calendar with me at all times is powerful stuff… So there are improvements coming, and I keep hoping that someone from a software company will call asking me if I have any ideas so that I can unleash 10+ years of frustration. They simply aren’t doing more than adding features at this point, it seems.

So, the technology hasn’t kept up and we are having a hard time as a result. Up until now. I’m hopeful about the future, however, so I keep playing my part by point out the shortcomings (and latent opportunity) in the fact that no-one is giving you what you need to do your job.

Some specific suggestions: schedule “dead-time” — see my posts on 5-calendar or 6-calendar views. Use the best scheduling tool money can buy (within reason.) Might be an iPad using the software I mentioned at the moment. Be aggressive about looking for upgrades. New stuff is coming out all the time and hopefully someone has hired Dezhi to help them design the next generation. Assume that you are Clark Kent, not Superman when building your Schedule. In other words, be conservative and use unbiased estimates in your schedule that are closer to the average than anything in the tail…

I wish I could point you in the direction of other resources that might help, but I appear to be alone in writing about this stuff at this level of detail. I hope I’m wrong, and that someone points me to other blogs/books that could help, but… well, I’m surprised that we aren’t talking about this more, and beating down the doors of the software companies demanding our rights to good scheduling tools!! Just joking… kind of.

This is my first response to any of your blog postings, so let me start by saying how much I admire the depth and rigor of your thinking on the topic of time management, and that I wholeheartedly endorse your assertion that the key to effectiveness is in applying proven principles to designing our own approach rather than trying to find and fully adopt any given system in its entirety.

Regarding your post above, the deficiencies described by Dezhi Wu may help explain why I have trouble embracing the approach you advocate of placing action items in my calendar rather than only on a list. In your video last year (http://www.mytimedesign.com/wordpress/fixing-the-weekly-review/) you suggested that in order to succeed with the approach of putting our action items in our calendars, we needs to get procient and comfortable with adjusting and revising our schedules during the course of the day to accommodate shifting priorities and unexpected demands. I’ve tried doing that and it seems to add a lot of non-value-added work to my time management process.

Let me add that I’m not rejecting your proposal outright. I’ve read about the research showing that we are much more likely to do something when we’ve not only decided to do it, but also decided when we’ll do it. And I have experienced the challenges you site in your video: I find it difficult to maintain the habit of doing a weekly review, some things that are low on my lists linger there for weeks or months, and I’m keeping in memory any number of future deadlines that need to inform how I’m using my time.

But here’s what’s difficult for me about putting my action items into my schedule: Let’s say I realize on Monday that something I need to do — call it Task X — will require about 45 minutes of heads-down time, and I don’t have that time right then. So I look at my calendar and see that I have 3-4pm open on Thursday. I put Task X on my calendar at that time. Unfortunately, the odds are high that by the time 3pm Thursday arrives, Task X will not be the most important way to use that time. So I do something else — something more urgent and/or more important — at 3pm and look for another slot in which to schedule Task X. But because I have all my tasks placed in my calendar, moving Task X means bumping something else — something less time-sensitive, perhaps, that can itself be moved out. And moving that task might mean bumping something else in turn.

So using this approach, the simple act of rescheduling an action requires an unwieldy, time-consuming and even enervating cascade of calendar changes — and because of the volitale nature of my work demands, this happens multiple times each day, day after day.

So here’s the challenge: how can I obtain the benefit of deciding and clarifying when I’m going to do any given action without incurring the costs associated with filling up my calendar with stuff that impedes the agility and efficiency with which I manage my work?

From your descriptions of the work of Dezhi Wu, it seems that having calendar software that applies her principles would be a big help. But given that MS Outlook is my company’s standard corporate scheduling system, I wouldn’t necessarily have the option of using such software even if it existed today.

So the inquiry I’m in is how to resolve this dilemma by modifying my practices within the constraints of the tools that are available to me. I will share what I come up with, but in the meantime I would be grateful for any suggestions you might have.

“a change in the final due date can automatically cause all the dependent tasks to shift their due dates in concert” – org-mode can do this in several ways. My usual way is to select a tree of tasks and then Bulk schedule them for “++2d” which moves them all on two days relative to where they were. Org-mode isn’t the prettiest thing, but it gets some things you mention above so right (like mixing your diary and your project plans into an agenda for the day) that I felt it merited a bit of exploration. It works for me, but probably won’t be to everyone’s taste.