I started watching YouTube videos of block scheduling on your calendar. It’s very interesting and I plan on trying it out. I remember @MacSparky talking about it and that got me really looking into it. My question is some of the people on YouTube say just put your reminders on the calendar, is that a thing? Do people do that? And would you make it an all day event for a reminder or at a certain time?
I appreciate any suggestions and help. Thanks
I can only speak for myself but I do NOT put reminders on my calendar. I block my calendar each day for specific deep work on projects. This is the “reminder.” My actual reminders are part of my task management system, separate from but connected with my calendar, i.e., I have the daily calendar showing at the top of the today view in my task manager.
I don’t add reminders to my calendar, but I sometimes block time out to complete a task which is extremely related but slightly different.
Example: I might make a 30 minute block to call my bank about something time critical. M This serves as both a reminder and a blocked time window, but if it wasn’t so urgent I’d add it to my to do list instead.
I schedule reminders for sometimes-recurring things that happen a few times a year that I usually forget, like “Clean the A/C filters,” “Renew vehicle tabs,” “Change smoke alarm batteries,” etc. This way I get a notification in my face instead of a reminder just sitting there meekly on the calendar. I should mention that I use a calendar app that combines my calendars and reminders.
Reminders on calendars get messy. If I have a reminder for today and don’t attend to it, then it basically scrolls away as time passes and gets lost. Calendars are for events – activities fixed in time. I assign date and time to very few reminders – and I use Due for them.
If something has to be done on a certain day, I’ll put it on my calendar, whether that’s a task or a meeting.
Tasks are usually left as “all day events” unless they have to be done at a specific time.
I also tend to put my "Meetings With Other People” on a specific calendar, so I can always see just those things if I want to.
For example, I recently signed up for a ‘free trial’ that expires on September 24th. I created an all-day event for September 23rd that says “Cancel X Before Tomorrow”.
I have another one for the first Monday in October that reminds me to start planning for All Saints’ Day, which is the beginning of November.
I have one for September 7th that says “Check in with Officers” of an organization that is meeting on September 14th after taking the summer off. I don’t have to do that at a specific time on the 7th, but I want to do it some time that day.
On the afternoon of the 6th, when I’m looking at my calendar for the 7th, I’ll pick a time to actually do it, based on what I have scheduled for the 7th. Or I might write the email on the 6th and set it to send on the morning of the 7th.
When time blocking a particular day, I think it makes sense to schedule specific times for tasks. The key is to make sure that you can always easily tell your "Meetings With Other People” from everything else. To me, that’s not really difficult to do on a day-to-day basis.
So, while I wouldn’t just put “Reminders” on my calendar, but I would put tasks on my calendars. However, I tend to do that either the day before (preferably) or the morning of (if necessary).
Otherwise, I find that an “all day event” is a good ‘placeholder’ for things that have to be done (or that I very much want to do) on a specific day.
Calendars5 by Readdle.
With the app I use (Calanders 5 by Readdle - i[Pad]OS only) the reminder hangs around until I check it off (hence the “in-my-face” characterization). Apparently this is an app-specific feature.
Like some others have said, I don’t use my calendar for reminders. However, if there is an important task that I need to accomplish I’ll put it on my calendar.
I have kind of a hybrid approach, and I block time on my calendar for tasks and projects.
Similar but maybe slightly different to others. As tasks do take time, I tend to block out time on my calendar for “errands”. In that event, I add the tasks (could be from various sources) as notes in the calendar, I want to complete during that period. Rewriting them like this also reinforces them in my mind.
Yesterday was:
I gave myself an hour to do these things. I add the location so I can manage my time and where I’m going to be. It turned out Myer sold the yoga blocks as well so some time saved there.
I very rarely do. I’ll put my rent reminder, birthdays I cannot forget. But I don’t want too much clutter in there or I won’t see what I absolutely need to see.
For reminders, you might want to try Due, Things 3 and the Apple Reminders app is really very good now.
Maybe if you used an additional calendar and save another for the absolutely-I-am-not-gonna-forget-this!
I was thinking. In Apple’s Calendar app I believe you can have multiple calendars. If you were good about keeping them separate (not that I necessarily would be) you might be able to pull it off.
This is a very important point. Either to put your reminders in one (separate) calendar than your actual meetings, or put all of your meetings in one (separate) calendar.
You really need some way to tell them apart if something does come up at the last minute and you need to quickly find time to be able to meet with someone, etc. However, in my experience at least, that doesn’t happen so very often, and needing to manage both tasks and meetings happens almost every day.
(I suppose you could do something like put an “@me” at the start of tasks that were on the same calendar as events, but I wouldn’t do that unless I had no alternative.)
maybe two different calendar app might work better.
however, I’m sure that people use one for work and one for home. You’d have to be quite careful and coughing up the $ for a second calendar app would not result in any real confusion because they LOOK different and operate differently.