I put most of my my stuff in Apple reminders, stuff I need to do around the house or stuff I want at a store or for work.
Since I own a house now I need to put the garbage out two days a week. I was stuck on if I should put this in reminders or the calendar. I ended up putting it as an all day event and to alert me at 4pm when my garbage is allowed to be put out. One event is for garbage, and a separate for recycling. I like to keep them two separate events.
I also have an event for my water filter in my fridge and my filter on my heating unit. But I think I might switch these to only tasks. I will probably make a list just for house stuff.
For me, to-do items flexible due dates go onto Apple Reminders (in the appropriate account – personal (iCloud), work (O365), or school (O365). Scheduled things where I have to block off time to do them go onto the Calendar. Things like meetings, phone conferences, gym workouts, haircuts, hot dates with my girlfriends, etc.
That you enjoy reading the essays says a lot for both you and your students! I taught little ones and often had to read them aloud phonetically. When I could decipher an essay, it received a smiley face.
For me a task manager is for things I need to do, and a calendar is for places I need to to be.
If I have a task that I need to do at a very specific time (self imposed or otherwise) then I’ll add the task to both my calendar and task manager (time blocking).
Ultimately most tasks are not time sensitive, so adding them to the calendar would be arbitrary. Even if you used all day events as the task part, the date might be arbitrary for some tasks and when you end up with a long list you might find it unwieldy.
I think of it this way: tasks are for things I would consider complete, partially complete or left undone. Things I could “get back to” completion if and when I get the time (think “overdue”). Tasks are also for recurring items that may occur more than once a day (brushing teeth, taking out trash, taking meds). Tasks are flexible; they exist with or without a predefined day or date.
Calendar is for events that are fixed in time and space - stuff that will and must happen at an exact time of day with a known duration: anniversaries, birthdays (considered all-day events), meetings, lunches, dinners and so on.
My calendar is used for things with a specific time and day. If the item is something I am not sure I will attend I preface the time with a ?
So for example: Today my calendar has one item on it From 11-2 State vet ispenction for the Canadian import sheep. On the 6th of December I have an item from 10am until noon ?MacSparky meetup for planning. I will try toattend but I may not be able to so that’s why the ? in the event.
My Task Manager is primarily in Omnifocus. Within it I have projects and within that the various next actions I need to do on those projects. So for example in the Canadian Sheep Import project I have the following items listed as tasks:
Send thank you letters to all the folks that helped along the way with a link to a note of the names and addresses of those people
Create a detailed timeline of the events as they happened with a link to the note in Obsidian where I am starting that
Collect fecal samples and send off to lab for parasite FEC data (which will be followed by deworm if needed)
Contact vet and alert to the new arrivals
Contact Federal Scrapie officials and see what I need to do to document them and what that does to our export qualified status
I am also moving a LOT of my task management into Obsidian. Right now it’s just the things related to AnimalTrakker and LambTracker development but I expect eventually it to encompass nearly all my items that are currently in Omnifocus.
So the task part that is in Obsidian has things like this:
In the AnimalTrakker folder I have links to the flowchart for the code I need to write, the queries that need clean-up or debugging and the kanban note for each module with what is currently being worked on. I have a section within Obsidian that is being version controlled in git into a repository and another that is the public facing support website for AnimalTrakker One of the kanban boards are the tasks I ned to do to write notes that go into that web site and get published.
I also have the files of text messages during the actual sheep import that need parsing into a coherent timeline by transcluding blocks into the timeline along with my other notes and references to the pictures I took.