I just stumbled across a post over at Matt Cornell’s blog in which he shares an experiment he performed around the discipline of Scheduling.
For those readers who are familiar with GTD®, you will notice that he clearly crosses a boundary that that particular system enforces. The schedule should only be used for items that have “hard edges,” or in other words, cannot be changed easily (e.g. a meeting with your boss at 4pm.)
From a 2Time point of view, this boundary is what separates White Belts from Yellow Belts in time management. Yellow Belts don’t need elaborate lists that must be checked once a task is complete — they simply set up their calendars to handle most all tasks (while using lists to manage items on a shopping list that don’t require individual time-slots.)
My own opinion is that when David Allen, the author of GTD, wrote his book back in 2000-1, the tools for scheduling were simply too crude to contemplate the kind of schedule that a Yellow Belt maintains. Today, we have iPods, Blackberries and Palm Pre’s, and they make scheduling a much simpler task, and the job of carrying around a schedule at all times as easy as carrying around a smartphone.
(While I do have issues with the fact that smartphones don’t easily allow users to create scheduled items from individual emails, I have to think that that capability is coming… the sooner the better!)
Until that happens, visit Matt’s blog to read: Testing the Classics: A Time Management Experiment: Time Blocking
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