Task Tool
The more I use the custom task template I developed, the more I believe in it as a near-optimal tool for me to plan time. I should put a blank copy up somewhere so others can try it out and comment. It has four categories: TODAY (things I am planning on doing today), UPCOMING (along with the target completion time, things that don’t have to happen today but will need to happen soon), LOWER PRIORITY (things that could happen just about any time but are not schedule breakers or critical), and DEFER OR DELAYED (things that would be in LOWER PRIORITY except that it isn’t really feasible to work on them now).
I use a shift+drag in Excel to move the tasks from column to column, ideally always leftward toward TODAY. Then the macro gadgets start. I can press Ctrl+Shift+C to “complete” a task, and Ctrl+Shift+P to “progress” a task. There is a second sheet that records the task and date whenever either of these two combinations is pressed (a “complete” logs the task and date and deletes the task from the big list, a “progress” logs the date and task with (P) appended and does not remove the task from the big list).
As a tertiary tool, I have a PivotTable that runs basic daily statistics on the workload (measured in number of tasks, which has to be interpreted specially on days with one thing that takes all day). This transfers over to a line graph to find patterns in the spikes and troughs.
This is not a day timer. It’s pretty much a tool so when you get off the phone, or finish an e-mail, and say “Now what?” you have an immediate answer. Works fine for me.