GTD: The Hard Landscape

Rule number 1: As the hard landscape of your GTD practice, your calendar should work for you, not work against you. Your calendar is your guide, your map, a directory to get you through your day, week, and year. The layout of the information should be designed to work with your natural viewing habits.

If this is the case, then what should go in the calendar?

Rule number 2: Your calendar is not a 'to-do' list and it is not an In-box. For those of you familiar with David Allen's Getting Things Done productivity system, you know that only three things are to be entered into your calendar:

1. Time-specific actions
2. Day-specific actions
3. Day-specific information

That's it. Because your calendar is a tool that you use to tell you where you need to be and when you need to be there, or when something is scheduled to happen.

"Time-specific actions" are, simply put, appointments or meetings. These entries tell you what you should be doing at a specific time and date.

"Day-specific actions" are tasks that need to be accomplished on a certain day, but not at a pre-arranged time. For example, you may need to print out a report when it is e-mailed to you sometime on Thursday, because you have a meeting to review the report at 9:00 am Friday. "Print XYZ Report" goes into the calendar for Thursday as an Action, while "Sales Meeting" goes into the calendar for Friday as an Event.

"Day-specific information" consists of things that you need to know on a certain day, such as directions to a dinner party, what your friends or family is doing that day, or where to find contact information for a call you need to make. It can also serve as a pointer to a Reference File or something on your Waiting For list.

By limiting the amount of information that goes into your calendar, it will become much more useful to you. You can can see at a glance where you need to be any given day, and/or what actions you need to take. When your calendar gets cluttered-up with todo lists and random notes and scribbles your ability to extract pertinent information from the calendar is reduced significantly.

There are several different ways that you can enter information into your hard landscape, depending on your personal preferences. Some people like to color-code the entries with different color pens or highlighters. Some prefer to simply use black or blue, but I recommend that you get into the habit of writing in your calendar with a pencil.

Using a pencil allows you to erase an entry if it needs to be changed or post-poned. Those of you with very dynamic schedules will know what I mean about making changes.

I use the following symbols to track my calendar entries, as to their status and priority. A basic entry might look like this "10:15 am Meet Joe re: Sales figures"

• A dash [ - ] in front of the entry, for example "-10:15 am Meet Joe re: Sales figures" means that the task is ready or underway. In this example it would mean that I have everything ready for the meeting.


• A plus symbol [ + ] in front of the entry indicates that it has been completed, i.e. "+10:15 am Meet Joe re: Sales figures". The dash is changed to a plus after I meet with Joe.


• If Joe were to call me and re-schedule the meeting, I would put an arrow [ > ] in front of the entry, and the new date/time after the entry, thus "> 10:15 am Meet Joe re: Sales figures/new date 18 Feb 11:00 am". I will then make a new entry in the calendar on the appropriate day.


• If an entry is cancelled, or no longer relevant, I will put an "X" in front of it. I will generally not erase a canceled entry as I like to look them over each week during the Weekly Review, just in case there is something that I would like to follow up on or reschedule.

Once you familiarize yourself with a marking system like this, you will find that your calendar tends to have much more room available for your entries. Or you can use a much smaller calendar/organizer than you may have used in the past.

Many people use a 3- or 6-ring binder, or a Circa style notebook for their organizer, which contains the calendar and other sections for notes and such. I highly recommend this format over a pre-printed calendar or notebook for one simple reason - you are not locked in to a format.

Another reason for using a binder-style system is that you can add tabs and additional resources in your organizer. I have 5 sections in my personal system:

1. The Calendar - This month and next month in 2-page-per-week format.


2. Addenda - A section for more information that does not fit on the calendar page with the base entry. In the "Meeting with Joe" example above, this is where I might put some notes on the sales figures and the meeting agenda, with important points to cover.


3. Next Actions - In the third section I keep a list of all of the Next Actions that need to be taken, each tagged with its appropriate Context (i.e. @computer, @phone, etc).


4. Waiting for - The fourth section is a list of responses or replies that I am waiting for in order to move forward with a project or program.


5. Contacts - The last section of the organizer contains contact information for people that I generally interact with offline. While my email client holds much the same information on the people I communicate with online and off, I can't always remember my sister's address. Also, I am not always at a computer, but I do always have my organizer with me.

Depending on the size of your organizer, you may be able to store even more resources, such as phone and birthday lists, project planning pages, note-taking pages, etc. The possibilities are only limited by your imagination.

Here are some pictures of my organizer pages from Flickr:

This is the 2-page-per-week calendar.



Next Action pages



The Waiting For pages. These are actually now color-coded green.

In Context MultiMedia:

• Productivity in Context - Basic practices and simple methods for improving your workflow and home life.


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• Marketing in Context - SEO and online marketing tactics for building your business and brand.


• Blogging in Context - How to start and run a blog, building traffic and subscribers with content and cleverness.


• Training in Context - Self-study courses on a range of personal development topics.


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