There are two schools of thought when it comes to personal productivity. Both are right in their own ways, but having to choose between them can be detrimental to many people’s productivity systems of choice.
The first school believes that you should never put an item on your schedule if it doesn’t absolutely need to be done at that time. The thought is that once you begin putting items on your schedule that aren’t really time sensitive, your mind goes numb to that schedule. And once that happens you simply can’t trust your schedule as a receptacle for anything important.
The second school of thought believes that unless some thing is dire, you’ll be hard-pressed to get it done unless you set a time for it. We’ve all worked with a person who operates like this – the one who you can’t schedule a meeting with because their calendar is filled with time blocks that aren’t really meetings.
I’m sympathetic with this way of thinking. When?is one of the most important questions and personal productivity. It’s also the most overlooked.
For years I was torn between these two schools of thought. And when I was finally bold enough to try to make a compromise, I came up with a system that has mostly worked for me. I call it the Simplified Scheduling System, or S3 for short.
The S3 is a compromise between laying out your work on a calendar and just building a long catch-all next action list. It answers the question of when without being so specific that it becomes a calendar. But it also avoids being so general that anything on the list can be done at literally any time—thus forcing you to have to decide what you should be doing each time you look at the list.
The S3 categories are:
- Today
- Next few days
- This week
- Next week and after
Any task you want to do for an active project should go into one of these 4 categories. And as you get tasks done, you move up the other ones to the sooner categories. It’s a very effective way to streamline your process for making your card each day.
