Getting your pastoral life organisedPosts in this series
In this post I want to continue to encourage you to have multiple calendars, including a General Tasks calendar.
Using a calendar for tasks is helpful because many of your tasks as a minister are recurring tasks; they show up week after week. So if you tried to keep track of these tasks on a program like Evernote, you'd be forever deleting and writing tasks out again. But the beauty of the calendar is that when you finish a recurring task for a given week, you simply need to click on it and delete it only for that week.
How do you add tasks to a calendar?
Firstly, to start a General Tasks calendar you need to know how you're going to add tasks to a calendar. This is a slight difficulty because electronic calendars are not always designed to keep track of tasks, rather they are designed to keep track of appointments in time slots. So when you have no specific time that a task needs to be done on a particular day, adding it to a calendar can be slightly problematic.
But with Google calendars, I simply add tasks as 'All Day' appointments. This is helpful because the 'All Day' tasks sit at the top of the day by default and don't get interspersed with your appointments. It also means that you get maximum space for the title of your task, i.e. a time doesn't come at the front of the task and waste space ('12pm Print sermon' becomes 'Print sermon' - a saving of 5 characters!).
What goes on your General Tasks calendar?
Everything that I need to do at the office on a particular day goes on the General Tasks calendar.
Anything that does not need to be done at the office but is for another location does NOT go on the calendar. Those tasks go on another calendar.
And anything that does not need to be done on a particular day does NOT go on the calendar, it goes on my General Tasks list in Evernote.
So my General Tasks calendar for the next two weeks looks like this (with some items blacked out for personal reasons).
No comments:
Post a Comment