New ways to plan your day 🎊

Hi,

Do you ever want to plan your day without scheduling it down to the minute?

Yesterday I released a new version of Day Optimizer that adds 2 new ways for you to plan your day. Now you can plan your day 3 different ways:

Commitment List
Decide what the tasks, appointments & activities you plan to tackle today, so you can increase your focus & stop getting overwhelmed and distracted by your master task list.
Time Bucket
Create a bucket of your available time filled by commitments. Allocate time to those commitments so you know when your "bucket" is overflowing and you need to uncommit from some. Drag & drop to set your priorities, then see in real-time what you still have time to accomplish today.
Daily Schedule
Build a daily agenda that maps out exactly when you plan to do each commitment, to help reduce procrastination and assign each commitment to the right time in the day based on your circadian rhythm.

I'll be hosting a webinar on Monday, December 28th at 11a Pacific Time / 2p Eastern Time to go over the new features and how to use them most effectively. To attend, register here.

Read on for a quick introduction of the commitment list and the time bucket, plus a list of bug fixes and minor features that were included in this release.

If your Day Optimizer trial has already expired and you would like to try out the new ways to plan your day, simply reply to this email and I'll re-activate your trial. Since it's the holidays, I'll extend it through the first week of January.

Commitment List

The Commitment List is a list of everything you have committed to do today. If you are using tags, commitments are grouped by their first tag; otherwise, it is a plain list.

Building a daily commitment list helps you deliberately decide what to work on today, so you can hide everything else. Avoiding your master task list helps avoid getting overwhelmed by everything on it, or distracted by something less important.

By combining your appointments and daily activities with your tasks, you get a list of everything you will be spending time on today in a single screen. It lets you take advantage of the Done Today vs Done Forever task flow functionality of Day Optimizer without building a full schedule.

If you mark an item Done, it's moved from your Remaining Commitments to your Done Commitments. This helps you focus on on what's left to do, and gain the satisfaction from seeing your list shorten. The Done Commitments shows everything you accomplished today.

If you decide you can't get around to a commitment, mark it Skip to remove it from your Remaining Commitments and move it to the Skipped Commitments box.

To see the Commitment List in action and get a better feel for how to use it, join my webinar next Monday, December 28th. Click for details & registration.

Time Bucket

The Time Bucket is a prioritized, allocated list of commitments that helps you work down your commitment list in priority order and make trade-off decisions on what to do as your available time changes throughout the day.

Creating a Time Bucket Plan

Building a time bucket involves two steps currently:

Commit to everything you want to attempt to do today.
Allocate time to each commitment.

In the Allocate step, there is a button called Set Times that let's you set the start and end time for your day and calculates how much time your bucket contains.

After you press Done to complete step 2, you'll be brought to the time bucket dashboard which shows you a list of your commitments, with the height of each commitment dependent on how much time you assigned to it. On this screen, you can drag and drop commitments to reorder them according to priority.

Visualizing Your Remaining Time

If you have the Time Remaining view enabled (which is the default—press Views to change it), you will see your bucket "filling up" at the bottom as your day progresses.

Think of your day as a bucket of time that you fill with different commitments. But imagine it as a bucket that is filling with water as the available time in your day diminishes. Commitments that are "under water" you won't have time to do today; those "above water" are still possible.

The Time Bucket plan visualizes this by shading the commitments or part of the commitments that are "under water" as grey. You don't have enough time in your day to get to these. Commitments that are white are still doable.

Making Trade-Off Decisions

If you mark a commitment as Done or Skip, then it falls to the bottom of your bucket, pushing up your remaining commitments. This let's you see in real-time what you can still accomplish in the time you have left.

If a commitment is under water that you need to accomplish today, simply drag it to the top of the list. Or give yourself more time by pressing Edit and then Set Times on the Allocate step to push back the end of your day.

Start Off Prioritizing & Uncommitting

When using the time bucket, it helps to start off your day by dragging your commitments into their priority order and then uncommitting from anything that is under water before you even start.

I am considering making this a formal 3rd step of the planning process, since it's critical to getting the most value out of the Time Bucket plan.

Uplevel From a Commitment List

If you start off building a Commitment List, but decide you want a Time Bucket or Daily Schedule instead, simply click to the corresponding sub-menu underneath Today and press Uplevel My Plan.

To see the Time Bucket in action and get a better feel for how to use it, join my webinar next Monday, December 28th. Click for details & registration.

Other Updates

Mark Yesterday's Commitments Done
Yesterday's plan is now editable until a plan for today is created, allowing you to check off yesterday's commitments before creating your next plan.

To access the plan, click on Plans on the main menu (previously called Schedules), click on yesterday's date, then select Commitment List, Time Bucket or Daily Schedule from the sub-menu.

Edit Goes To Last Step
The Edit button on plans now brings you to the last workflow step instead of the first, since that's the most common step people want to edit. That means you don't need to click through the Commit and Allocate steps to rearrange your schedule.

If you do want to edit your commitments or allocates, simply click on the step to jump back in the workflow while editing.

Refresh Button Removed
Data between your laptop and mobile device has automatically been synced in real-time for several months now, so the Refresh button, which helped users force a sync between devices back before we had real-time data, has been removed.

Note that the Resync button remains for appointments, which allows you to force a resync with calendar providers. You can use the Resync button on the Appointments page or on the Commit step when building a plan in the Appointments box.

Fixed Error Saving Default Times
A recent release broke the ability to save your schedule times as default times, showing an error instead. This has been fixed, and you can now save times as the default when setting the times for your schedule.

Fixed Snooze Date Saving As One Day Earlier
A recent release changed how the snooze date was being saved, causing it to be saved as one day earlier than whatever date you entered. This only happened in time zones west of Greenwich Mean Time (e.g., North and South America). This has been fixed so it should save the correct date in all time zones.

That's all for now. If you try out the new plans, please let me know what your experience is and what might be confusing or could be improved.

All the best,
Trevor