What are the Problems with traditional Day Planner Software?

Having a todo list organizes what needs to be done, but does little to help you visualize if you are over-stretching yourself or if you can really meet those tight deadlines.
You need a structured plan detailed enough to have confidence that your workload is achievable, but flexible enough to re-adjust itself allow for interruptions.
You need to visualize what is happening with your time, not just crossing things off a todo list. When you are tired, you will scan to find something easy and work on that.

What are the Goals of Good Day Planner Software?

1. To forget everything that isn't related to the task at hand

How to concentrate deeply on what is in front of you

Every time you remember something that you need to do, you blocked another thought that you could be having. This is why good ideas usually come to you when you are relaxed. The idea was there before that, but when relaxed there were no competing thoughts to block it from entering consciousness.

Creative people write things down, not because they will follow up on everything—but because it clears the way for more ideas, more connections, more breakthroughs. If you are spending your thoughts on forgetting and remembering things, you are preventing deeper connections from ever reaching you. There are only so many thoughts that you can generate in a day.

Just like you exercise so that your body performs better when you aren't exercising, you become organized so that your mental state is clear and receptive towards the right ideas.

Time Mapping lets you program tasks that normally wouldn't fit into the boundaries of traditional todo list software. If you need to get a hold of someone and they will be around between 2pm and 3pm you have three options:

A) Keep it in the back of your mind

The downside is that this will prevent you from getting deep with any idea, it will pull you back so that you have enough awareness of the time to make the call between 2pm and 3pm.

B) Write it down

But you still have to remember to check your list in time. So you've switched keeping in the back of your mind the thought: "call between 2pm and 3pm" to "there is something important on my list, don't forget."

C) Set an alarm

The nice thing here is that this lets you forget, but the alarm will interrupt you at 2pm, and perhaps you only needed 15 more minutes to get to your breakthrough, but you've interrupted that.

A better way?

Time Mapping solves this by letting you program the constraint and it will only interrupt you if it sees that you won't make the window.

2. To cut away just before you were going to finish your idea

How to push through procrastination

The intuitive approach is to work on a project until you finish, or until you don't feel like it anymore. The problem with this method is:

If the task is complex, the mental resistance can lead you down day dreams that aren't on the task at hand.
If the task is boring, you can find yourself getting distracted from what you are supposed to be doing with some detail that isn't that important.
If you have to stop, it takes momentum to pick up where you last started.

Authors have known for decades the importance of leaving their chapters unfinished, sometimes in midsentence before they get up for a break or finish for a day. Why? When you manipulate new ideas, you are making new connections. It takes time for the neural networks to reorganize themselves efficently so that you can move through the ideas.

By leaving a hook for yourself to bridge what you were doing, with what is next, you will instantly recall everything you were thinking of at that moment when you left the sentence half way. Only now when you continue to think about, you will find new ideas along the natural connections that you would make. It makes it easier pick up a project this way.

The ideas don't need relaxation to come together, they just need an incubation period. Working on another project would give you the same effect, but you'll also make progress in that project. After all, your idea of relaxation is probably considered overwhelming work toward someone else. There are people who enjoy manipulating numbers. There are people who enjoy hiking up mountains.

3. To draw a line of exactly what you will do, and when you will stop

How to avoid distractions

When you have a clear objective in mind, with a clear deadline approaching—you unconsciously focus and become more productive.

When time is unstructured and vast, it is difficult to find ways to make the most out of that time. The options are too many and we get overwhelmed and suspectible to procrastination.

Having a list of exactly what needs to be accomplished, and by when, if believable is invigorating and motivating. Why? Because it cuts out distracting thoughts that take you away from your vision. When you have a deadline approaching, it is easier to concentrate because you aren't being distracted by ideas that would usually interrupt your flow. You no longer ask yourself if it is possible, or when you should do it, in a way it all becomes very simple.

Good productivity is mostly just making it obvious what needs to be done so that you can unconsciously allow yourself to make it happen.

How Does Day Planning with Time Mapping Work?

Time mapping takes a list of estimates and priorities and calculates the most efficient order at any given point in time. Create flexible agendas by adding deadlines, scheduling constraints, and soft alarms that don't interrupt. Like a GPS it will instantly recalculate after any estimate overruns, interruptions, distractions, appointment reschedulings, changing priorities.

Being able to see visually how you envision your time in the beginning of the day, and how it responds throughout the day makes it easy to improve naturally—just through seeing the numbers.

Time mapping is flexible enough so that you can stay focused on the current task with the confidence that should any task with constraints become at risk at not getting finished in time, Watership Planner will let you know.

Here we have an example of a day that began shortly after 7am and it is currently 9:14am. We have already have already tracked and completed 3 tasks and are currently still working on "Write rough draft of marketing presentation."

Below the example are some scenarios that can happen at 9:14am and how time mapping would rearrange the tasks.

Legend
	Tracked Time A record of what you did
	Todo When given an estimate todos are automatically scheduled, they move around depending what is happening around them
	Appointment These can't be moved
	Current time Everything above this line are tracked times, or what actually happened in the past. Everything below this line is automatically scheduled, a projection of what is expected to happen
	Current task The todo after the current time line is the current task you are working on, it has a bold font
	Constraints Automatically scheduled tasks can have constrainte.
	Gaps Places where the automatic scheduler couldn't fill them with task small enough to fit. You can designate tasks as splittable or that can be broken up, like "Respond to E-mail" perfect for doing during these gaps

You will get most of your calls finished before lunch and have a 45 minute buffer before the monthly meeting

Try Day Planner Software with Time Mapping and understand your time visually

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