Tech Habits: Calendar-Maxxing

A lightning-speed guide to the ‘Saturday Frontier Method’: the simplest most natural way to plan your week either way ahead of time or as it comes to pass.

Saturday Frontier on iOS using Order

Long-time readers know I’m a bit bullish on Calendars.

Ages ago, I mentioned a method I still use called the ‘Frontier’ method of blocking time on your calendar. The idea is simple:

• Some events are ‘sacred’: they are essentially hard commitments on your calendar
• The rest are on your ‘frontier’: they are ‘drag-and-droppable’ on your calendar. You put them in a placeholder spot somewhere on your calendar and when you find a natural time to do them, you move it to that time.

[embed]Discipline Absorbs Chaos. Try This Game-Changing & Simple Way to Manage Your Time. You choose your favorite apps, papers & pens. The ‘Frontier’ time blocking method takes care of the rest.medium.com

I’m using this term “Calendar-maxxing” since I will argue that you could ditch most productivity apps for a calendar.

Need to share when things need to get done with others or reminded of key events? Create calendar events. Make them recurring. Whatever.

Need to log a bunch of notes or share artifacts like documents and spreadsheets? Place them in the description of the calendar events directly.

Need to see at a glance project milestones and day-to-day activity? Use different views of a calendar as the source of truth.

Need to capture a few quick tasks you need to get done this week and reconcile them with your existing commited events? Place them on the calendar or move them to another date. This will make it least likely you will miss them.

Actually, it’s hard to think of apps that provide more value to me personally or professionally than the simple calendar.

To illustrate, I will show you a technique I’ve been using for years that I’m now calling the ‘Saturday Frontier Method’. The ‘Calendar-maxxing’ part of this and the subtlety of it is that it essentially omits a separate app/list to track things you want to get done in a week.

The idea is super simple.

First, get comfortable with the idea that a week is a very natural and productive time for planning. I go into detail on that and the relationship between calendar and lists in this article:

[embed]Have You Been Using Your Calendar All Wrong? Turn your mundane schedule into a canvas for daily inspiration whether it’s in your notebook, Apple, Google, and even…medium.com

And this Cal Newport podcast has a nice portion dedicated to the naturalness of it:

[embed]

Second, pick an end day of the week: Saturday or Sunday. This will be simultaneously your frontier day and the day you quickly review what’s left to reschedule tasks. For the purposes of this post, we will use Saturday.

Third, if you think you should get something done in the week but don’t know when, throw it as an event on Saturday and roughly T-shirt-size it.

Fourth, as you are planning or going through your day, drag and drop (either literally or conceptually) the Saturday Frontier events to the time you actually are doing the tasks.

Fifth, when Saturday rolls around, spend a few moments to reschedule to another Saturday frontier or delete.

At first glance this seems rather ugly. Why not keep a separate list of tasks and move them in?

I’d argue that the constraints of calendars help keep you honest even at the ‘list’ stage of planning your week. You’ll quickly see if your week is getting too busy if a few big-rocks and minutiae take up most of Saturday when T-shirt-sized.

Also, Calendars have powerful features like recurring events so you can nag yourself.

And the cherry on top is you never need to leave your Calendar app.

You can use any calendar app of your choice.

If you’re schedule involves many shared calendars etc, you can go all in on an app like Google Calendar and be the most comfortable there.

If you require manipulating a lot of disparate calendars across many services both professional and personal an app like Fantastical, Apple Calendar, etc. may be better.

And if you’re a #PlainTextPlanner like myself, you may want to manually curate your events for the week in the interface of your choice where all events are tracked in simple plain text. For me, this is not just a matter of being principled about portability, it provides me a lot of clarity to walk through events and gets me comfortable with how to use my time with intent. And as another cherry on top, plain text apps are very slick and fast and don’t need an internet connection.

To illustrate, I plain text plan in my own homegrown app Order where the week view on desktop is default (day for Mobile). This is how a week could look like:

Monday through Friday holds the committed schedule, fixed-time blocks of varying length. Recurring anchors (Morning Standup) repeat each morning, with meetings and deep-focus blocks slotted around them: a 90-minute Project Review, a two-hour Focus Block, Team Sync, Planning Meeting, Demo, a long Writing Block, and personal anchors like Gym and Dinner with Family. These are the things that must happen at a specific time.

The far-right Saturday column is the Frontier, a staging area holding the week’s candidate tasks rather than scheduled events: Pick Up a Gift, Message Mark, Write Blog Post Draft, Draft Project Proposal, Car Wash, Costco, Finish Home Project. Nothing here is committed yet; it’s a visible backlog parked in the same week view as the real schedule.

The planning move is drag-and-drop from the Frontier into the week. You can already see a few tasks that have been pulled onto weekday slots, mixing in with events: Reply to That Email (Mon), Book Dentist Appointment (Wed), Order Desk Accessory (Thu). Because tasks and events share one surface, deciding when to do something is the same gesture as committing to it, you drop it into an open gap, and the empty space in the grid shows you exactly where the capacity is.

So the screenshot captures the core idea: one week view that unifies a fixed calendar of events with a draggable pool of intentions, letting you triage the week by moving tasks off Saturday and into the time you actually have.

But what about actual events I have on Saturday? This glaring problem has turned out to be almost non-existent in practice for me because I typically cluster my Saturday Frontier events away from real events and it’s usually pretty obvious to me. The third cherry on top is that wherever my Saturday Frontier events are in time on Saturday tends to be a good time to review them and does not conflict with existing events.

More on the Order app, how it relates to Calendars, and why I would go through all the effort to make the app anyhow in a longer piece later, so ‘till next time, happy to check in here this beautiful Saturday 🏔️