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Kate from Blog to Discovery has been kind enough to take on the beta-test of my GTD calendar project with me. She has posted her review at her blog, and has kindly allowed me to cross-post it here. Thank you, Kate, for your excellent suggestions.

I agree, by the way, the @Projects section is going away in the next iteration- because I am not using it either! It has actually moved to my TiddlyWiki…

Review of HDBizblog’s Calendar Page Project

Stephen at HDBizblog has developed a weekly calendar and overview on one page. One of the things I have found most interesting is the layout design because it follows the concepts of the F pattern as used in web design. The F pattern suggests when you look at a webpage your eyes tend to register more information on the left hand side than the rest of the page, therefore in the left hand column Stephen has positioned a column to capture big rocks to ensure they receive maximum attention during the week.

Here are my thoughts (and pictures of my usage) having trialled the template for a week (you can also read Stephen’s thoughts).

Initial impressions

My organiser is A5 size so I downloaded the picture and printed it to fit one A5 sheet. Unfortunately something went wrong and I managed to crop off the top of the form, but I’m not sure I would have used the weekly labelling anyway.

I am very attached to my yellow highlighter pen and use it to cross out completed tasks on both my task list and day planner. However due to the high proportion of yellow on this calendar I had to try an alternative colour, blue. However perhaps this is a healthy move for me!

Big rocks

I think this is a great idea because it really highlights those key tasks to be completed that week. As I haven’t yet identified my goals, I used this space for the tasks that had deadlines that week with work tasks listed at the top and home tasks at the bottom.

I think this section would work really effectively by linking this table to my goals such as allocating several slots to goals, acting as a reminder to have at least one task each week for each goal (perhaps by adding pale text in the background e.g. goal 1).

Appointments

I am currently not using a paper calendar for appointments as I have recently been given a blackberry. I have therefore used this section for my day specific tasks and repeating tasks; I would like to be able to distinguish between these tasks more easily perhaps by adding an an additional pale column so I can indent repeating tasks so they appear as lower priority. Again I positioned work related tasks at the top and home tasks at the bottom.

@ projects and weekly review

These two sections are the ones I used the least because I haven’t introduced contexts into my system and because I didn’t undertake a weekly review that week (it is somewhere on my to do list). I like the idea of including a weekly review checklist, but I’m not sure the project section adds much for me, partly because it is unlikely I would fit my projects in the table. I think it would be much more useful for me to include my routine checklists from my day planner in this space.

Conclusion

I think it is a great idea to summarise the week on one page because it easily provides an overview (and uses less paper). However I found I was continuing to use my day planner during the week so obviously there are components I like that are missing from this calendar. Although I would not use the calendar as it stands in my organisation system there are several ideas I really like and which I am planning to incorporate into my system. I’ll let you know how it goes.

If you found this post useful, please share it with your friends on Twitter using the tinylink http://tinyurl.com/63lkh7. Thanks, I appreciate it! Feel free to comment below, I enjoy discussing these ideas. ~@Stephen