#Better than smartday app series#

I love it! Each morning I put together the day’s agenda based on my weekly plan. While I don’t have an assistant who schedules for me, I am that assistant.Ībout the time that I read this article, I heard about an iOS scheduling app very similar to SmartDay called Timeful.

But it wasn’t until I read this article about how the president’s day is scheduled that I realized that I needed that kind of productivity. I thought I needed to revisit the idea and I did begin using SmartDay more frequently. The first thing that convinced me of the value of scheduling was Francis Wade’s post that has been hugely popular on this blog.

#Better than smartday app series#

But my passion for the habit of scheduling my days didn’t reach its peak until after the series was over. I did love my week of using SmartDay, an iOS app that automatically places to-do’s around scheduled activities. It felt too restrictive for this spontaneous, time-rebel woman. #2 Schedule your dayīefore my year of productivity, I wasn’t really wild about scheduling my days. Just 30 minutes of planning will be a wonderful investment in your productivity. I f you aren’t getting much accomplished in a given week, try a weekly planning session. I no longer have calendar surprises! For more on my weekly planning process, read this post. I can set weekly goals and make sure that the tasks I can reasonably accomplish in the upcoming week are visible. Rather than overwhelming me, a weekly planning session (or review) helps me feel in control. I actually look forward to it! I review my calendar, projects, and life areas in ToDoist, and even Pinterest ideas that are sorted into corresponding secret boards. Now I have the habit of planning my week each Sunday. Using a paper planner during my experiments convinced me weekly planning was important. I was often finding myself surprised that I couldn’t get to a number of tasks I planned because I had forgotten about prior commitments. Unfortunately, that meant that I wasn’t reviewing my calendar or projects for the upcoming week. I became overwhelmed by the process of reviewing all potential to-do’s each week as part of the GTD process and so I just didn’t do it. The GTD habit I didn’t have was a weekly review. I had these habits prior to experimenting. I loved it and should have been a paid seminar leader for as many people as I told about it. GTD was the impetus behind me finally getting my email under control and collecting all my to-do’s into one trusted system. #1 Plan your weekĭavid Allen’s Getting Things Done was my first foray into productivity literature. I’d love to know if you have different advice. Barb wanted specific advice for a time-management hiccup that plagues many of us. I hope you’ll listen to an interview I did with Barb Raveling of the Christian Habits podcast on the subject. My hope is that reviewing what works for me might give you some insights into what could work for you. The benefit of the series is that I learned the most important habits for getting more done. I spent a year doing weekly experiments in productivity.