Recently I have migrated from my trusty old red notebook and bullet type journal system to keep track of my to do list to a web based program called focuster. I did so because I was becoming a bit overwhelmd with my notebook system. I still believe there is utility in carrying a notebook and the tactile nature of writing something down. It is way faster than trying to look up something on your smartphone. That said, in my notebook I had a 2 part system, a yellow post-it that captured all things I needed to do and each page I would bullet out what I was going to do in a day. At times I would find myself spinning my tires trying to determine what to do from the list and it is easy to lose focus and do the easy stuff first and then by the end of the day the meaningfull bits remain unaccomplished. Enter focuster.

I have tried other online systems, omnifocus, my life organized, trello, tools in GitHub but they all seemed like a digital version of my notebook with the nicer organization. In addition to my notebook I lived and die by my calendar. I make my calendar viewable to students and others online which really cuts down on the multiple emails needed to schedule a meeting. So when meetings occur then no work can really be scheduled. So a system the allows one to work with a caledare and ‘schedule’ work is what is needed on my end. I want to be able to account for existing meetings and then have tasks scheduled in the open blocks. That is what Focuster does. One neat thing that you can visualize on calendar there is where ‘gaps’ occur in your day, illustrated below.

The gaps in a time block schedule can arise from 2 sources: 1) a task took longer than you allocated or 2) you were doing another task that was not on your daily timeblocks. Either way at the end of day you can see where your workflow might be in need of a tune up or some adaptation to daily rythms or how to allocate tasks more approprately to the time needed to complete.