Turning task management into time management

Last week I talked about practical ways to capture all your to-do items easily and in one place. But we need to go a step further. None of the capture matters if everything just lives in one long list of “I really gotta get to that.”

It’s going to fail if everything lives in the same flat pile, asking for the same level of urgency, attention, and energy. Your brain looks at it, panics a little, and decides to reorganize your kitchen instead.

So let’s talk about how to triage, prioritize, and actually schedule tasks so they stop haunting you and actually start getting done.

I’ll walk you through two different approaches, depending on how much structure you want and how much your calendar already runs your life.

This works if you need a calm, repeatable way to decide what matters this week.

Once a week (Sunday afternoon or Monday morning works well) you open your task list and make three decisions about every item you actually care about:

Is this urgent?

Is this important?

Does this require real focus, or can it be done in a low-energy moment?

You are not doing the tasks yet. You’re sorting.

In Notion, this is easiest if your tasks live in a database with a few simple properties: priority, effort, and status. You just need to be able to see, at a glance, which tasks are both important and time-sensitive, and which ones are quietly optional.

Once you’ve identified the small handful of tasks that actually move something forward, you stop trusting yourself to “get to them later” and put them directly on your calendar by assigning them a date. It doesn’t have to be an exact time down to the minute, but it should make it onto your daily schedule somehow.

This is your time to look at your actual calendar and assess not only what you WANT to get done but what you have the time to accomplish.

If you’re using Notion Calendar or Google Calendar, this step is the same: you’re turning intention into a time commitment. When the task lives on your calendar, it stops competing with everything else in your head.

Anything that doesn’t make it onto the calendar is officially not today’s problem for a reason. You can stop beating yourself up about it or thinking you should be doing something else - you’re making an active decision about what actually deserves your attention today.

Pro Tip: Notion let’s you overlay a database, like your Tasks database, over your regular calendar so you can drag and drop things around other meetings and events. It rules. Find out more about Notion calendar here if you’re not already using it!

This approach is for people who are tired of renegotiating their entire life every morning.

Instead of asking yourself what should I work on today?, you decide when different kinds of work happen in advance, and then let tasks flow into those containers. Your calendar becomes a set of default decisions, not just a record of meetings.

This is typically called Time Blocking and I’ll start by saying this works really well for some people, and absolutely not for others. If it sounds like it could be helpful for you, I highly suggest it! Even in small bursts or only for certain chunks of your day, time blocking can reduce a ton of decision fatigue.

You start by time blocking your week around types of work, not specific tasks. Focus work. Admin. Meetings. Creative. Errands. Whatever categories actually reflect your life. These blocks repeat week to week, which is the important part. The consistency is what reduces decision fatigue.

For example, maybe deep, focused work only happens in the mornings. Life admin lives in a two-hour block twice a week. Meetings get batched into afternoons. The exact structure doesn’t matter nearly as much as the fact that it’s predictable.

Using a virtual calendar or weekly planner are great for this because they make your time blocks visible and hard to ignore. When you look at your week, you’re you’re seeing constraints instead of a blank canvas.

Once those blocks exist, your to-do list becomes secondary. Writing tasks go into writing blocks. Admin tasks go into admin time. If a task doesn’t fit anywhere today, you can assign it to the next block for that type of thing and take any notions of “I should be doing that…” out of it.

The real benefit of time blocking is that it gives you fewer chances to debate what’s next and get distracted. When your calendar shows you what’s next, you spend less time planning and more time doing.

Pro Tip: Varied time blocks can work better than even, longer blocks. For instance, break up chunks of deep work with 20 minutes to answer emails. Put in a 30min lunch break, then 15 minutes to water the plants, then an hour re-order inventory before 3 hours of editing.

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