Getting Things Done

The Actions That Go on Your Calendar
For the purposes of organization, as I've said, there are two basic
kinds of actions: those that must be done on a certain day and/or
at a particular time, and those that just need to be done as soon as
you can get to them, around your other calendared items. Calen-
dared action items can be either time-specific (e.g., "4:00—5:00
meet with Jim") or day-specific ("Call Rachel Tuesday to see if she
got the proposal").
As you were processing your in-basket, you probably came
across things that you put right into your calendar as they showed
up. You may have realized that the next action on
getting a medical checkup, for example, was to call
and make the appointment, and so (since the action
required two minutes or less) you actually did it when
it occurred to you. Writing the appointment into
your calendar as you made it would then have been
common sense.
What many people 
want 
to do, however, based
142
The calendar should
show only the "hard
landscape" around
which you do the
rest of your actions.

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CHAPTER 7
| ORGANIZING: SETTING UP THE RIGHT BUCKETS
on old habits of writing daily to-do lists, is put actions on the calen-
dar that they think they'd really 
like 
to get done next Monday, say,
but that then actually might not, and that might then have to be
taken over to following days. 
Resist this impulse. 
You need to trust
your calendar as sacred territory, reflecting the exact hard edges of
your day's commitments, which should be noticeable at a glance
while you're on the run. That'll be much easier if the only things in
there are those that you absolutely 
have 
to get done on that day.
When the calendar is relegated to its proper role in organizing, the
majority of the actions that you need to do are left in the category of
"as soon as possible, against all the other things I have to do."