Why not just put EVERYTHING in your diary?

Taking it for granted that it’s a good idea to write everything down, the question is WHERE to write it?

On my time management training courses I teach that there are three places to put things

1 – Master list of everything, which is where you put things that are too big to do in one lump (you might call them projects) and things which you are going to do at some point, but you don’t know when.

2 – Daily jobs to do list, which is where you put the small stuff that you’re going to do today, at some point

3 – Diary / Calendar, which is where you put time-related things.  These could be when someone has promised you something by a particular date, things that you can’t do yet but have to wait until you can do them, things that you plan to do at some point on a particular date in the future, or things that have an exact time when you will do them, for example meetings.

But a couple of times recently I’ve met people who don’t do this, they just put EVERYTHING in their diary/calendar.

The idea is that for everything that comes up, you decide when you’ll do it, and you put it in your diary for then, ...and that’s it.  

Here are the pros and cons of doing this, as I see it.  I’d love your additional comments if you are reading this and you have an opinion:

Pros of “Diary Only”

• Forces you to commit to when you’ll do something
• You can clearly see the time filling up so you how busy you are 
• It’s all in one place, simple
• You can still allow time for things that crop up, so you stop filling up your diary once it becomes half or three quarters full
• You can still allow time for yourself during the day - or at least you know if you aren’t going to have any self-time on a particular day!

Snags with using “Diary Only”

• Some things just don’t have dates so it feels a bit arbitrary to give them a date
• It’s hard to reshuffle if something comes in – (or something drops out) – you might have to move lots of things around in your diary
• It’s not easy to distinguish between ‘fixed’, ‘within the day’, and ‘moveable but happens to be in this day” – unless you use colours.  (Why do we need to distinguish?  Because if something has to slip it mustn’t be the first type and shouldn’t really be the second.
• You know you can slip some of the tasks in your diary, so there’s a risk you can get into the habit of snoozing a whole raft of tasks.  
• What David Allen calls “Hard edges” – if some tasks are post-ponable then you use up mental effort choosing whether to do or postpone each task.  Whereas in my system “diary means diary”, “today means today” – don’t even THINK about not doing a task that is in your diary!
• Not mood sensitive - so if you feel less good and are having a less productive day you still have to face a diary full of stuff, whereas with my system it’s up to you how much work you pull from your master list - ….but maybe that’s a good thing?

So there are lots of pros and cons, and for me the key difference (and I have tried the diary-only method) is that I ended up pushing an ever increasing raft of tasks ahead of me as I failed each day to finish everything.  Instead now I have an increasingly long master list of tasks that I push ahead of me – haha! – but that takes less time and effort to push, it feels less depressing, as I’m not faced with my failure every day like I was when I was pushing the daily diary raft.  

But maybe it would be good for me to face up to the fact that I can’t do everything I want to, everything that’s on my list.  Maybe if I gave the diary method another go I’d HAVE to get better at saying no, and delegating, and I’d shorten my jobs list - and then achieve them all….

Chris Croft

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