Personal Planner

Here I would like to learn and develop effective mechanisms and systems to plan and organise my time, across all of my responsibilities and leisure activities. I aim to constantly try out different organisation systems and note down my learnings and takeaways. In doing so, I hope to devise a system which is robust and works well for me, and to also identify the key guiding principles for the same.

Google Suite

The first productivity system that I will try to use is centred in the google suite. In my first attempt I have not studied much literature to try and come up with the optimal system. Rather, I have relied on my own experience to arrive at a few guiding principles to begin with.
The guiding principles here are: 1. Maintain a master list of ToDos (across work, personal, urgent and long term tasks). This will ensure that all mundane mental space is freed up, and nothing is forgotten.
2. Schedule time slots for as many activities as possible. When an activity has been allotted time, as long as your schedule allows for enough buffer and down time, the likelihood of it getting done increases.
3. Update ToDos and schedule real-time. This means updating new/completed tasks as and when they come up, automating updation of routine tasks and reading new tasks from whatsapp/email etc.
4. Routinely check for a 2+1 balance. This is an important balancing method in this approach. This principle assumes that one has 2 large time consuming, urgent dimensions in their life and 1 important, but distant dimension. For example the 2 time consuming dimensions may be work and personal life (health, family, social and entertainment). These need to be attended to on priority and can often take up most of your time. The 1 distant dimension could represent goals, dreams, hobbies etc. In a good week, this dimension should get whatever free time you can dedicate to it. If not forced in as a priority (when possible), this dimension can often lose out to down time and going with the flow. It therefore becomes important to ensure that one's calendar not only covers all tasks on the 2 time consuming fronts, but keeps slipping in a few tasks from the 1 long term dimension.
5. Write a diary. Just making sure that you find a little bit of time to reflect on each day and document what happened, can be a nice activity. It ensures that one has a little bit of time to themself, and is able to unpack the numerous happenings of day to day life. I also particularly like the idea of documenting my days. Whether I read through a random day's diary or use it to jog my memory on what happened during some period, it is really cool to have a diary as a window to one's own past.

With that general sense of guiding principles, I'll now try and learn how I can best use the following tools, to bring my personal planner to life:
- google calendar
- google sheets
- google docs
- google photos
- gmail
- whatsapp todos & google keep
- google script

To Dos

Create notes and useful links to the google sheet planning system (using agile?).