You may have read the title of this post and thought “Great, more things in my life that I need to find time to get together.”
Well, the thing is, once you do these two things, lots of other things fall into place.
Imagine a scenario with me: You’re having a particularly busy week. You have family things to take care of, car or house issues to get fixed, and work projects that need to get done.
You put them on your to-do list, whether that’s an app, a sticky note, a paper planner, or your mind.
What normally happens here?
These tasks that are not already built into your normal routine keep rolling over to the next day or week like old cellular minutes from 2005.
Why? Because a to-do list is a list of output. It’s what needs to get done. It isn’t a plan for HOW you get it done.
Having a to-do list without a calendar is like saying “I’m going to build an exact replica of the Millennium Falcon,” but having no schematics or materials with which to do it. It’s like Michael Scott in The Office “declaring bankruptcy” by yelling the phrase out publicly.
Enter the calendar.
If the to-do list is the list of output, the list of “what needs to get done,” then the calendar has the potential to be the “how it gets done.”
In order to create a calendar entry, you need two things: a time, and a title of the task.
The time sets a specific period in which you accomplish this task.
The title, done right, forces you to create a strategy. A “how.”
As an example, let’s say you have a long document you have to complete. Whether it’s a research paper, a long-form blog post, or a report for your job doesn’t matter, pick what’s most applicable to you.
If you create a calendar event for 3:00pm on Tuesday and just title it “finish project,” then you haven’t created a strategy, you’ve created a task. That belongs on the to-do list, not the calendar.
Instead, make the title something like “work on report for 90 minutes.”
What have you done here? You’ve taken an item from your to-do list, put it on your calendar to work on at a specific time, and created a manageable way to make some serious progress on it.
Protecting that time is a whole different post, but this is the takeaway I want you to get here:
You need a to-do list and a calendar. The to-do list is your “what needs to get done,” the calendar is your “how it gets done.”
If you’d like more posts like this, would you pretty please like, comment, or share this so I know it’s something you find value in? I’d appreciate it so much.
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