Tasks -V- Events: Why there’s an important distinction.

Whenever I post a YouTube video about using a calendar, some viewers will inevitably comment, saying, “I wish I could connect my tasks to my calendar”.

I can promise you that you do not want to be able to do that. And the reason why so few companies build apps that allow you to do this is because they are protecting you from yourself.

There is a very clear distinction between a task and an event. An event needs to be done at a specific time on a given day — for example, an appointment with your doctor, a colleague/boss or a client.

A task, on the other hand, can be done at any time. You may want to do a specific task on a particular day, but when on that day you do it doesn’t matter. For example, booking your car for a service could be done at 9:30 am or 3:15 pm. The only thing that matters is booking your car for a service that day.

In the pre-digital age, we used to carry around large A5 or A4 desk diaries that showed the week over two pages. Two-thirds of the page was dedicated to your calendar, and at the bottom, there was space to add six tasks for the day.

Side note:

The reason there was space for six tasks was down to a gentleman called Ivy Lee. Ivy Lee developed possibly the most effective task management system ever created. That system is called The Ivy Lee Method, and I urge you to look it up.

This structure was not created by accident; it developed over hundreds of years and worked brilliantly.

The key was to keep your appointments and tasks separate unless a task needed to be done at a given time, in which case it was added as an event in the calendar part of the diary.

Followers of David Allen’s Getting Things Done will know that date-specific tasks should be put on your calendar and everything else kept on a list to be done as and when you can do it.

Maintaining this separation between tasks that can be done at any time and events that need to be done at a specific time means you avoid being overwhelmed. Your calendar takes precedence over your task list. It’s your primary time management system, and you want to keep it clean.

Another issue is that when you take tasks from your task manager and add them to your calendar, you duplicate things. Now you have a task in your task manager and an event on your calendar. What is it? Is it a task you can complete any time, or must it be done at 2:30 pm today? Do you really want to make that decision when stressed out and under pressure?

That said, there is a way to make this work for you. Time blocking. Time blocking is a technique where you block time out on your calendar for doing specific types of work. For example, I have a two-hour block in my calendar for writing today. All it says is “Writing Time”. This means I get to decide what I write in this time block.

If I received an urgent request from my boss this morning to send her a short report on a sales campaign we did last week; I would have the flexibility to write that report in that two-hour block. If my boss was better organised than that, I could choose what I would write from my list of writing tasks. The only thing that matters is I sit down and write during those two hours.

Time blocking works effectively for people in sales. You could block the first hour of your working day for calling prospects. The list of people to call would be kept on a list of prospects, and at 9:00 am, you open that list and begin calling. If you were to drag all the calls you wanted to make into your calendar, all it would take is one talkative prospect, and your plan would be destroyed.

Over the years, I have worked with many doctors, and their calendars are carefully curated. Those who work in surgery have blocks on their calendar for when they are in the operating room. Those in the Emergency Room have their shifts blocked on their calendar. Should an operation finish early or the Emergency Room is quiet, they can open their task manager and choose tasks they can do in the time they have.

If a meeting finishes twenty minutes early, what will you do with the twenty minutes? It’s these pockets of time we get through the day where having all your tasks in a task manager allows you to pick something to do with this unexpected time. If you were to schedule your tasks, you would resist and lose that gift of twenty minutes.

Ultimately, confirmed appointments take precedence over tasks; perhaps many of your appointments are in your workplace, and some may be outside. If you were caught in a traffic jam or your meeting overran, your carefully organised calendar for the day is destroyed. You have no flexibility. However, if you were caught in traffic, all you would need to do is look for the people you should call that day and do your calls instead of working on the presentation file.

Ultimately, it’s about maintaining some flexibility in your day. No day will ever go according to plan; there are too many unknowns, and you need the flexibility to handle the unexpected. Dragging tasks that can be done any time in the day onto your calendar destroys that flexibility. And if a meeting does overrun or you are caught in traffic, you will ignore the tasks, which means the power of your calendar diminishes.

So, keep tasks that can be done anytime away from your calendar. Treat your calendar as sacred territory so that anything on there means it must be done at the appointed time. You will thank yourself for maintaining that separation, and you will have greater flexibility in your day.

Thank you for reading my stories! 😊

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