For those who schedule the next day in advance, how do you use Everdo to do this?
Over the past year I’ve become a huge fan of Time Block Planning, thanks to Cal Newport’s great work on the subject. I think of GTD as the “what/how/why” of productivity, and TBP as the “when.”
One of the habits I’m trying to build is a shutdown routine around 4:30pm. This includes tidying up my emails, files, Everdo, etc. and planning out my time block for the next day. This way I can spend time with my family tonight and then start the day fresh, ready to “eat that frog.”
The problem I run into when planning my day the night before is that I effectively have to look at two Everdo views in order to plan my day: Next and Scheduled (tomorrow). That’s because sometimes a scheduled task takes priority over what’s next. The result is that I more often than not skip my planning until the morning, when all of tomorrow’s tasks have cycled to next.
The only way to fix this is to either:
Bump all of my next tasks to tomorrow. The downsides are that it takes time and every task becomes focused in the morning.
Bump all of my tomorrow tasks to today. The problem here is that it messes with recurring tasks’ dates.
Change my system clock to trick Everdo into thinking right now is tomorrow
In my mind the best solution would be a “End The Day” button that effectively tells Everdo that right now is tomorrow, moving all of tomorrow’s tasks to next and letting me sort them accordingly.
I know this seems pedantic but it’s been a big block for me and I’m hoping there’s a way around it from this great community. Cheers!
This is likely to lead to sync anomalies in the actions you’ve changed after the clock shift, so I wouldn’t do that.
A big reason why it’s tricky to implement this “bump tomorrow tasks to today” thing, and why simple hacks will work poorly, is sync. Because all your devices need to somehow agree on this bump. It would be very easy to do in a cloud-based app where there is a single source of truth for the data.
Personally I just do any planning first thing in the morning. Not sure how much this is caused by the friction of doing it in the evening. Though I don’t usually have many scheduled tasks.
What does your planning look like? When you have to look at both views, what are you trying to achieve?
When planning my day, I’m pulling tasks from Everdo and strategically organizing them onto my Time Block Planner. Imagine each sticky note is a task, and I can only fit so many sticky notes on my calendar each day.
When looking at “next” and “scheduled” I’m trying to make good decisions of what to put on my calendar. I think the crux of this is that I use a lot of scheduled tasks, including repeated tasks, across weekly/monthly/quarterly/yearly horizons.
Upon further review I think I rely too heavily on “scheduled” as “someday/maybe junior,” aka tasks that I want to get done someday but that I want to prioritize it more than what’s on my someday/maybe list.
So you are creating blocks in your calendar based on Next/Scheduled. Does this mean that if some Scheduled action doesn’t make it into Tomorrow’s calendar, you’ll need to re-schedule it for a later day in Everdo?
I might have misunderstood something, but it seems like for this use case looking at Next and tomorrow’s Scheduled separately is not a big source of friction compared to having it all in one list. For example I think I would review Scheduled first and either add to calendar or reschedule, then add more things from Next.
That’s a good idea. I think the problem is I need to reign in my Scheduled list, and instead boot tasks in there to Someday/Maybe. That way it’s more manageable to look at the lists sequentially as you mention.
