Time is a precious resource that cannot be regenerated. Every task in work, daily chores, learning interests, or new skills requires time. To accurately control and have a sense of ease? In reality, this is a challenging task.
Separating Life and Work Affairs#
We need to separate life and work. When using Calendar to manage goals, its usage scope should be clear. For example, record TODOs, OKRs, or reminders for appointments, birthdays, anniversaries, and other events.
Based on personal preferences and goals to be achieved, clarify the usage method of the calendar.
Once determined, do not put unrelated miscellaneous things in it.
I hand over the trivialities of life to "TickTick", which includes shopping, life, various electricity bills, water bills, installment reminders, and so on. After completing a task, I check it off, and my mind feels refreshed.
Although TickTick can be categorized by using different folders to separate life and work, from the perspective of inner feelings, TickTick is more like a garbage cleaning tool.
If work tasks are placed in TickTick, on the one hand, it feels less important; on the other hand, life and work should be treated separately.
I don't want to see unfinished work-related tasks in my to-do list after work. It's so annoying!
The only purpose of those unimportant fragmented tasks is to remind me not to forget to do them, but even if I forget, it doesn't matter. To avoid storing too much unnecessary information in the brain, such as "go to the supermarket to buy milk at night" or "change the oil for the car"... Although the data is very small, it occupies actual memory in the brain.
The key is that work tasks usually take a complete time period and cannot be completed in a few minutes. They are relatively complex and change with certain variables. Work requires collaboration, and one person cannot accurately control the progress.
In short, if tasks cannot be cleared in a timely manner in the to-do list, it will cause mental burden.
Different Tasks Require Different Management Tools#
Different tasks, different projects, different habits... require different apps to manage.
Give wedding anniversaries, family birthdays, etc. to "Countdown", an app with very beautiful desktop widgets that remind me how many days are left until someone's birthday, reminding me to buy gifts🙃.
There is also an app called "Drip Progress" that can record the time progress of specific projects. For example: "Yangmei Wine" has been soaked for "6 months and 29 days"; "It has been 4 months and 9 days since the last gout attack". It can intuitively monitor changes in certain foods, unique flavors, quietly fermenting, that is the taste of time.
It is not difficult to see that various tasks are categorized and managed separately. However, there are still obstacles to work project management. There is some resistance in my heart. Going to work is just to slack off. Don't give me trouble!
Sometimes we just want to do things smoothly, so that we can have more time to slack off🐟.
If we are entangled in work chores all day long, we will be overwhelmed and led by work, which is not the result we want.
Use Calendar to Define Work Time#
On the calendar, determine the working hours, mentally separate life and work, and clarify the boundaries between life and work.
Use a weekly display on the calendar, showing five days a week, and divide each day into "8:00-11:00" and "13:00-17:00" as effective working time blocks. All work tasks are planned or recorded by dragging the timeline of the day.
Unless you are not sure and need others to collaborate, once a task is assigned to a specific time block, it should be taken seriously and try to complete the task according to the timeline or do something related to work during a certain time period.
At first, I liked to add tags to work schedules, such as: taking photos, shooting videos, designing posters, etc. The advantage of this is that it can be displayed in tables in Notion. For example, how many photos, videos, and posters did I take, edit, and design this year or this month. This quantitative data is very eye-catching when making reports at the end of the year.
This year, I didn't divide it so finely. I recorded the effective focus that happened during working hours in chronological order. I handed over all things unrelated to work during working hours to TickTick.
So there are two calendars, one for life and one for work.
Time management is based on "things that will definitely happen", and schedules without fixed times are meaningless.
When the time comes, if you don't act, if you don't follow the schedule, it is at most a reminder. You can probably hypnotize yourself into thinking that you have done a lot of things from the full grids every month.
Are trivial matters also considered schedules? Shoe polishing, bringing meals to my wife... These are far from goal management. Using Calendar in this way can be regarded as an extension or supplement to a diary.
But we need Calendar not only as a diary. Diaries have their own writing styles.
The calendar, one small grid per day, its shape design sets limits.
Don't fill the grid with unimportant tasks to make it look good and deceive yourself.
The core of the schedule is the timeline. You do things from top to bottom, from left to right, in chronological order.
What you did on that day is fully displayed.
Tasks without start and end times should not be put on the schedule. Tasks without fixed times are difficult to execute and are prone to hesitation.
Difference Between TODO and Calendar#
The difference between TODO and Calendar is that the former has non-fixed tasks and the result is the final completion. What does that mean? Today, I need to wash the car, remember to recharge my phone in the morning, buy a USB flash drive on Taobao... These tasks have no fixed time, and once completed, they can be crossed off without looking back.
Calendar records linearly based on time order. Do not bring the TODO mindset into calendar management.
The usage of Calendar is to drag and allocate time blocks in chronological order: "8:00-9:30 Prepare PPT for the meeting", "10:00-11:00 Design the master poster" ... Learn about Ivan Bliznetsov's time tracking method.
Whether it is a pre-planned schedule or a schedule recorded after completing a task, it is fine, but only record the effective work events of the day.
Note that the key point here is "effective". Don't fill in things like going to the bathroom, what to eat at noon, how many cups of water to drink, and repetitive meaningless things.
Anytime, anywhere, keep your mind clear. The calendar grid is small, and the work calendar should only write things related to work.
What is the use of recording the work of the day? What is the difference between this and recording a list of work tasks and crossing them off? There is a difference. TODO does not look back, crossing it off is equivalent to deletion, telling the brain that this matter is over, game over, and releasing brain memory.
No one will look for how much phone credit you recharged three years ago. Of course, there is also a certain function similar to a supermarket receipt, such as when someone asks me how much the shoes I bought last time cost. I can quickly search and find that list. But the frequency of searching for records like this is very low.
I have never used the search function in TickTick. Its greatest function is to record trivial matters and throw them away after completion to keep the mind clear. You are not Lu Xun, who cares about what you eat and watch today.
Calendar needs to be reviewed, starting from a week of five days. What did I do during this week? Which time period did I do what and how long did it take? It is difficult to see in one day, but in a week or a month, you can gradually feel something different, which is called "routine".
Take design as an example. Any project is composed of small components. Shooting, retouching, editing, copywriting, how long does each task take? Through accumulation over time, you can get more and more accurate feedback, thereby building confidence in completing large projects and being able to provide specific time limits, appearing professional and capable.
Reviewing Schedules to Find Your Work Rhythm#
By reviewing the accumulated schedules in Calendar, repeatedly pondering, and finding the rhythm of doing things quickly and well. Commonly known as work rhythm.
The pitfall here is to completely copy Ivan Bliznetsov's time management. Eating, drinking, sleeping, every detail, all recorded. The timeline is so dense that it feels suffocating to look at such a schedule.
Who works like this? 80% of the time is spent slacking off, okay?
After Notion Calendar was updated, I had the idea of going ALL IN ONE. Originally, I synchronized the completed tasks in TickTick to Notion Calendar through "Tencent QQLian". Why did I do this?
By categorizing tasks in TickTick, such as design, writing, life... Notion uses a set of data to filter different categories, resulting in design calendars, writing calendars, and life calendars.
In fact, it is not very useful, just looking clean and feeling that my work is logical and hierarchical.
Notion Calendar makes up for the shortcomings of the original Notion calendar and can stack several calendars like painting layers. You can click on the small eye of the calendar you want to view.
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Life Calendar: Synchronize the miscellaneous list of TickTick with Notion as a life calendar, usually not opened, just as a backup.
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Work Calendar: Create a new Work Calendar in Notion, set the display mode as a five-day timeline, and record events based on the effective focus of the day.
When recording events, you can use tags like #writing at the beginning, and then use the filtering function in Notion to separate it into a separate page for easy statistics. Notion AI can extract fixed-format text from titles, which is also very useful.
Every time you write a schedule, you need to add an additional "@design Complete a master series poster" or similar, so that you can use the filtering function in Notion to separate it into a separate page for easy statistics. This writing method is a bit troublesome. If you are sure that you will not use separate pages for statistics in Notion in the future, you don't need to use this writing method.
Because the options for recording events in Notion Calendar are currently limited and there is no corresponding attribute to select tags, you have to manually create recognizable characters in the title for filtering.
Some people are upset because Notion products do not support Chinese and find it troublesome to use a VPN. But good tools can make your work more efficient, broaden your thinking, and achieve twice the result with half the effort.
Notion Calendar is an independent product. It is the tentacles of Notion and is still in its infancy, but it has a promising future.
We can use it to find our own work rhythm.
Let's make our work more refreshing.