At the end of every year I start to think about how I will manage my time and organize projects. I spend more time than I should on the question and I’m never happy with the answer. My thoughts always to back to my old Handspring PDA and a certain Moleskine notebook that worked flawlessly for one year. Of course my Handspring is long gone and I never successfully recreated that year with the Moleskine.
Last year I started using a bullet journal and homemade calendar pages to keep track of everything. It worked so well that I decided to do it again this year. But it didn’t really work that well and I abandoned the concept after a few weeks. Somewhere in between I started using a digital calendar again. It wasn’t planned, it just happened. At first I used ical on my iMac and iPad, but it doesn’t sync well with Google Calendar and sense I use an Android device that is important. So I migrated to Google calendar and haven’t looked back.
My Setup
I like to keep things as organized as much as possible, but I also have a creative side and the two create quite a bit of chaos. So I need to have a great deal of flexibility while at the same time structure. To satisfy both sides of my brain I created multiple calendars in Google calendar. I use Asana as my project management tool. It contains a feature that allows me to send the url to Google calendar. The items show up as tasks at the top of the day. I also keep a bullet journal to capture ideas and important information. The Bullet Journal is also the place that I track goals and projects. But I don’t worry about writing in it everyday.
My current calendars:
Me
My Wife
CLS
My Son
Family
Homeschool
Projects
Tasks
Plus two additional calendars that import from Asana.
I like to have the Week Numbers turned on and I have each calendar turned on to send me an email each morning. The email is in the form of an agenda with tasks from Asana at the top of the email. Each item is color coded to the left side of the email. This one hack makes it far easier to look at my day than looking at my calendar app on the phone.
You can make as many calendars as you want or as few as you would like.
My Process:
On Saturday or Sunday I open up Google calendar, Asana, my Notebook, grab any index cards I have with notes on them and plan out the next week. On the third Thursday or every month I plan out the next month as much as I can. Everything goes on the calendar. I have found that the more I put on the calendar, the better off I am during the week.
Jellyfish Principle 