Planning with a Calendar? This Advice Will Skyrocket Your Productivity!

“Skip the task list and use your calendar to plan your work” is popular advice given to busy knowledge workers. While planning with a calendar does have advantages, it does not work in practice and therefore is bad advice. Instead of planning with a calendar you should follow the Incremental Time Planning method described below. This will boost your productivity and make you happier.

1. The Calendar Planning Method Explained

“Skip the task list and use your calendar to plan your work” is popular advice given to busy knowledge workers. But how does it work?

1.1. How does the calendar planning method work?

When I was advised to plan with a calendar, I did not know how to actually do it. So I read every time-planning guru that talks about this planning method to learn the exact process:

Split projects and large tasks into small actionable tasks
Estimate the time of these smaller tasks
Put those tasks into the upcoming week´s calendar
Work only on the tasks in the calendar and block out everything else

1.2. Benefits of the calendar planning method

The reason why the calendar planning method is recommended is to avoid working on task lists that never get done. Task lists not getting done is indeed a serious problem that most people will have experienced. Why does it happen?
First, we normally put too many tasks into our task list. Second, because we have a stream of new incoming tasks that prevents us from getting to the tasks we had planned originally.
The calendar planning method does in fact help you in the following ways:

As you estimate time, you are more likely to put into your tasks list or calendar only as much work as you can realistically accomplish.
As you have to split projects and large tasks to smaller tasks, you become more aware of all the tasks that are involved.
As you are putting tasks into a time slot, you plan both your week as well as your day, and thus it's easier to focus on only those tasks, and neglect all other tasks.

2. Problems of The Calendar Planning Method

Despite the benefits listed above and despite the common problems with task lists, using a calendar to plan your work does not work in practice, at least not for 90% of the people trying it out, and therefore is bad advice.
I have tried the calendar planning method myself and have interviewed many others who have tried the method. Unfortunately we all had similar experiences. While we wanted to make it work, we just could not because of these problems:

Many urgent tasks cannot be planned in advance
Calendar gets too messy
Not flexible enough
No distinction between fixed-time-tasks and flexible-time-tasks

2.1. Many urgent tasks cannot be planned in advance

With the calendar method you have to assign exact timing of tasks a week in advance. But a week in advance you can’t foresee the tasks that will be coming at you over the week.
While it would be nice to just neglect these incoming tasks, it is often impossible or at least not advisable to do so. So you are quickly forced to rearrange the schedule of your tasks many times during the week.
Unfortunately, If you have to postpone one task you will have to put it into a timeslot that was already assigned to another task, which you then also would have to postpone. Quickly you might have to postpone all your tasks!

2.2. Calendar gets too messy

When you have to put each task into the calendar, the calendar quickly becomes messy. This is especially true if you split the tasks into smaller subtasks.
Let's imagine you have split your projects into small tasks of 10 minutes each. Of these tasks you might have 50 a day. Are you really going to put 50 different appointments into your calendar?
Now imagine that one task takes more time than planned, let's say one hour instead of 10 minutes. That would mean that you would have to reschedule not only this one but all later tasks. This works like a pile of dominoes, meaning one task being delayed causes the next one to delay etc.

2.3. Not flexible enough

Planning your whole week ahead with every task planned according to the minute does not give you enough flexibility. While it is important to get the things that you planned done, and not get distracted by other work, it is OK and in fact necessary to keep flexibility.
For example, maybe your electricity will stop working so you can't work on your computer. In this case you want the flexibility to reschedule your tasks to be able to work on stuff that does not need your computer.
In summary, the tasks you want to accomplish during the week and during the day should be set in advance, but the exact scheduling does not need to be planned one week in advance!

2.4. No distinction between fixed-time-task and flexible-time-tasks

Finally, when you put all your tasks into the calendar you have no more distinction between tasks that are really time bound because they are appointments (fixed-time-tasks) and tasks that are time flexible (flexible-time-tasks).
That leads to the fixed-time-tasks becoming less visible and therefore easier to lose sight of.

For all of the above reasons we strongly advise you not to use a calendar for planning your work and only use it for scheduling fixed time tasks like appointments, birthdays or hard deadlines.

However, we are well aware of the many benefits that planning with a calendar can bring:

More accurate planning of workload due to time estimation
Knowing what to work on in the week due to fixed weekly and daily tasks
No more delaying tasks due to fixed task date

So the question is, “how can we get these benefits without having to put tasks into the calendar?”

3. The Incremental Time Planning Method

The Incremental Time Planning Method has many similarities to the calendar planning method but it does not have the same impracticalities. These impracticalities mainly come from the fact that you have to determine one week in advance the exact schedule for each task on all days of the week.

The Incremental Time Planning Method instead has four phases of planning:

Planning in general for the month at the start of the month
Planning in general for the week at the start of the week
Planning for each day in the morning
Planning of the execution order during the day

3.1. How does the Incremental Time Planning method work?

The Incremental Time Planning Method has the following implementation steps:

Spit projects and large tasks into small actionable tasks (same as in calendar planning method)
Estimate the time of these smaller tasks (same as in calendar planning method)
At monthly planning, select the tasks to be accomplished during the month
At weekly planning, select the tasks to be accomplished during the week
At daily planning, select the tasks to be accomplished during the day
During the day, schedule and reschedule your tasks
Work only on the tasks in the daily schedule and block out everything else (same as in calendar planning method)

We can thus compare the two methods as follows:

Calendar Planning Method	Incremental Time Planning Method
Split projects and large tasks into small actionable tasks	Split projects and large tasks into small actionable tasks
Estimate the time of these smaller tasks	Estimate the time of these smaller tasks
Put those tasks into time slots over the following week or even month.	At the monthly planning, select the tasks to be accomplished during the month.
	At weekly planning, select the tasks to be accomplished during the week.
	At daily planning, select the tasks to be accomplished during the day.
	During the day, schedule and reschedule your tasks.
Work only on the tasks in the calendar and block out everything else	Work only on the tasks in the daily schedule and block out everything else

As you can see from the above table, the only difference (highlighted in red) is that instead of putting the tasks into the calendar, they are put into:

A monthly plan
From the monthly plan into a weekly task list
From the weekly task list into a daily task list
From the daily task list into the daily task schedule

We can illustrate the above planning process as follows:

3.2. Incremental Time Planning Method and the Focus Cycle Productivity System

The Incremental Time Planning Method uses the three core concepts of the Focus Cycle Productivity System:

Goal Pyramids
Focus Cycles
Time & Analytics

3.2.1. Goal Pyramids

“Goal Pyramids” means that you split projects and bigger tasks into smaller tasks that are actionable. It also means that these actionable tasks need to stay related to the bigger tasks and projects.

3.2.2. Focus Cycles

“Focus Cycles” means that you split the tasks into time periods of months, weeks and days and in each time period only focus on executing the planned tasks.

3.2.3. Time & Analytics

“Time & Analytics” means that you estimate the duration of your tasks, then track your work time and analyse the analytics on your performance.

3.3. Benefits of the Incremental Time Planning Method

The Incremental Time Planning Method has all the advantages of the calendar planning method but none of its disadvantages.
So the benefits are:

More accurate planning of workload due to time estimation.
Knowing what to work on in the week due to fixed weekly tasks and fixed daily tasks.
No more delaying tasks due to fixing the task date.

In addition, you will be more productive, have less stress and enjoy work more.

The steps in the Incremental Time Planning Method are difficult to do with just pen and paper. Unfortunately there was no tool available to implement this planning process, so we have developed a software to be used with the Incremental Time Planning Method, called Workiamo.

Workiamo is a Work Management Software that is based on the Focus Cycles Productivity System and is extremely simple. It is ideal for anybody that wants to be less stressed and more productive. As you are reading this, you have earned free, lifetime access! Register at www.workiamo.com by entering this code: ILOVEWORK.