Wednesday, August 1st, 2007...9:15 am

Making appointments with yourself.

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MAN!!! Have things been busy lately!!!

The plate is so full today that I felt the need to make appointments with myself to block off time to get some specific things finished today.

So today I have a full calendar in Outlook, in spite of the fact that I have only one meeting. Quite unusual for me!!!

Do you have a need to do this from time to time? What other things to you do to help you focus on a specific task for a while?

Have a productive day!!!

Jason

9 Comments

Filed under GTD

9 Comments

  • Nehal
    August 1st, 2007 at 10:27 am

    I do this quite often. There are times when I need to focus, so I block out some time in my calendar.

    I also have standing appointments on Friday PM (who wants a 4PM design review?), M-W-F lunchtime (lunchtime sports).

  • Jason Echols
    August 1st, 2007 at 10:58 am

    Hey, Nehal.

    I have a standing appointment to protect my lunch hour. Have to credit my Senior Manager for this one. I learned it from him.

    I have a “POM meeting” set up on my lunch every day. The “POM” stands for “Peace of Mind”

    I highly recommend it.

  • Matthew Cornell
    August 1st, 2007 at 7:00 pm

    Yes, it’s a practice I share with clients - Julie Morgenstern calls it “Time Mapping,” and I introduce it as a method of making time for certain classes of activity - project work, routine work, etc. The only caveat is to be careful to not schedule individual actions. Instead, when the time block comes, open up your actions, pick the one(s) that you’ll focus on, and go.

    I like the “Peace of Mind” idea!

  • John B.
    August 1st, 2007 at 10:17 pm

    Boy, oh boy… we do this all the time at work. Our organizational culture is collaborative… actually, overly so. As a consequence, there are entire weeks of nothing by meetings. If you have a week of

  • SpiKe
    August 16th, 2007 at 2:35 pm

    yeah, occasionally I have crazy days where my normal GTD system doesn’t cut it, and I need to micromanage my time
    Organize IT

  • Matthew Roberts
    September 11th, 2007 at 9:44 pm

    This is a great practice… and something I do quite a lot (sometimes too often ha).

    But unfortunately I don’t see many other people doing it regularly.

    Matthew
    http://www.InspirationToAchieve.com

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  • Francis Wade
    October 5th, 2007 at 9:18 pm

    I have been scheduling my time like this for the past six years or so, and when I stumbled across GTD, I immediately thought that something was lostin the approach.

    Now, I think that each user must learn how to balance both scheduled activities (solo or not) and listed items. I believe that there is a continuum of balance.

    It strikes me that GTD was born at a time when PDA’s were not reliable or widely used, and that it loses out by not teaching its users how to schedule the vast majority of time demands (or stuff), and listing fewer and fewer.
    IMHO.
    Times have changed…

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