![]() ![]() The way I see it, tasks are just one of many different types of calendar events. I agree that tasks should live in your calendar, but that doesn’t mean every calendar event should be a task. This approach is a step in the right direction, but it doesn’t go far enough. In Amie, every calendar event is a task that can be marked as done. New productivity tools such as Amie are trying to solve this problem by natively inserting todo lists into the calendar experience. So how do we get tasks into our calendars without awkwardly switching back and forth between two different apps that don’t talk to each other? It’s like playing Tetris with blocks of time. A calendar forces you to estimate how long each task will take and then find empty space for it on a 24 hours × 7 days grid, which is already cluttered with other things. Treating todos as calendar events is helpful because calendars introduce constraints. The part we haven’t really figured out yet is the intersection between task managers and calendars. Most of today’s email clients are built around the concept of Inbox Zero, which effectively turns your email inbox into a todo list with public write access. The emailtodo part of this workflow actually works reasonably well. At the beginning of each week, I go through my email todo list and block time in my calendar for each task.I snooze emails until the week I want to get them done.Tasks are emails I receive from others or emails I send to myself.I treat my email inbox as my primary task manager (and note-taking tool).Notes are just emails to your future self. But when you look closer, you’ll realize that these activities are actually not that clear-cut. The fact that we use four distinct tools suggests that note-taking, email, task management, and time management are four distinct activities. To organize the things we need to get done Our productivity stack consists of four types of tools: But before we discuss their future, we first need to analyze their present status and how they fit into the rest of the productivity stack. The essay at hand is an exploration of what calendars could be if they weren’t stuck in time. ![]() Isn’t it ironic that, of all things, it’s our time machines that are stuck in the past? And since their release, neither Outlook nor Google Calendar have really changed in any meaningful way. Our digital calendars turned out to be just marginally better than their pen and paper predecessors. You would expect technologists and entrepreneurs to be intensely focused on perfecting such a magical time travel device, but surprisingly, that has not been the case. It means allocating our most precious resource to activities with the highest expected return on investment. More importantly, they allow us to change the future.Ĭhanging the future means dedicating time to things that matter. Calendars allow us to travel forward in time and see the future. They are the closest thing we have to a time machine. It only tells us the status quo.Ĭalendars, on the other hand, cover the entire spectrum of time. It allows us to see time, but not to manage it. A watch is a useful tool, but its functionality is limited to the present moment. The most popular time device is the watch. To make the most out of the here and now. ![]() These devices help us to plan and optimize how we spend our time. To get a better grasp of this weird, intangible resource that governs everything around us, humanity has invented a variety of “time devices”. We experience it, but we can’t control it. It’s a constantly flowing stream that can’t be paused, stopped, or repeated.
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