Magic calendar

Rands has laid out his system of keeping things organised, a nice synergy with David's GTD. I do not have a fantastic or well organised and maintained system to do list as such to keep me going. What I have been using is Calendar, one of the best and cruelest interpretation of time.

So, what is the matter? Everyone uses calendar, what is the fuss?

We all know concentration helps. If you believe otherwise, try to get some eggs from your fridge and see how many you can handle at the same time. (Btw, here is a great tutorial if you are really interested.) A self contained efficient entity knows to perform its tasks to fulfil its destiny, in the same time allowing asynchronous event driven mechanism to respond to coninuous incoming changes from interactions with outside world. I dump everything onto my calendar so I can spare an empty while highly efficient mind when it comes down to event handling. This mind dumping is really a prioritise and planning process. However, it is only a prediciton, a guess or best intention of what the future would and should be like.

To dump eveything is probably a good start to relieve yourself from remembering the context and remind you for possible on time switching when the timer is triggerred. I bet you feel certain level of satisfaction by crossing some items on whatever list you hold and proudly mark, done. The trap is you need the spirit and habit to actually get those things done, other than comfortably move on by thinking that you have a box of stuff which 'have been dealt with'. Not long enough, you would realise many items start to pile up against the due dates. It is only a matter of time for you to bin the whole item list. What I have learnt is do not put anything can not be done in that time frame on to your calendar and if you can not get that item done at the time it is supposed to completed, you have probably missed the only opportunity to get that done. So, it is a serious business when you are making committment with your time. You will always have more than what you could do, hopefully. So it is ok to let things go. Sometimes this kind of choice makes sure you are spending your resource (time) in things that matters, rather than those just to fill the 8 hours of day time.

One thing I also do is to update the item with necessary information after it is done. I found it particularly useful when I have the luxury and bored enough to try to dig out what the heck I have spent last two months of my life on.

I have seen some of the scary ones - calendars full of stuff, I mean, they are not items as such, they are stuffed! Many overlapping tasks with fancy big names such as meditating to seek the purpose of life or restructure engineering process. I mean, come on. Who are you kidding with? I could not believe that would make anyone feel better by knowing that I am gonna have to delete this without any updates when time comes. Plus, there are better platform for this type of gestures - twitter.