Scheduling, planning and follow-through. Some questions

Posted by Alexander Deliyannis
May 26, 2014 at 06:22 AM

Hugh wrote:
>Interesting! Several Mac task managers seem to be going or have recently
>gone in the direction of graphically representing on a calendar when
>you’re planning to carry out your tasks, including the Granddaddy,
>Omnifocus. Not exactly GTD as I remember it originally recommended by
>David Allen, but still a useful development.

Others interested in this kind of feature may want to take a look at Pagico (mentioned here years ago I believe): http://www.pagico.com/

Planning beforehand _when_ non time-determined tasks are to be implemented is indeed not classic GTD and possibly reduces flexibility. On the other hand, I find that scheduling blocks of hours to work on major tasks requiring concecutively focused work—i.e. tasks that cannot be meaningfully advanced within 1-2 pomodoros—is critical for such undertakings. When I did my MBA concurrently with my job, the weekly regularity of work was conducive to my blocking half days for my assignments. I don’t think I’ve ever worked in such a structured way for such a long time before—or since.

It has been mentioned before that the GTD methodology is fine for people required to do many minor tasks during their workday. It is far from ideal for, say, writers, who need to ‘get into the flow’ and whose work cannot be broken into small independently implemented tasks.

BTW, I have found this topic extremely interesting and appreciate the valuable personal contributions and insights beyond software and tools. I hope to add more of my own—when I find the time.