Thread by @AdamMCorcoran

At @Portable, I’m one of our resident tools nerds and #productivity geeks. As someone with #ADHD (inattentive type), this is a crucial thing to be. I thought I’d share a recent path of discovery I’ve been on, including the tools I’m using and the calibration I’ve been working on.

It’s worth starting with context. I’m a manager in an agency. My time needs to be tracked. I have a lot of tasks flying at me. Prioritisation the most important things and making time for them are critical. And it needs to be easy to do, and relatively automated where possible.

It starts with my use of @reclaimai. It’s a clever, automated scheduling tool that weighs up relative priority, urgency and duration of my tasks and my regular habits and slots them around the meetings and set events in my calendar. I started out using it very granularly.

The granularity reached its end limit once I discovered @reclaimai’s integration with @todoist, and the relatively quick and easy ways you could log tasks in Todoist to then sync into Reclaim. But it got challenging. When should something live only in Todoist? Or only in Reclaim?

Before I answer that question, it’s also worth noting that @todoist integrates with @SlackHQ and my preferred email client, @SparkMailApp really well. So capturing tasks is pretty pain free in many places. Oh, and my preferred calendar app? @Cron – I’ll get back to that shortly!

While there was some clunkiness getting @todoist to push tasks to @reclaimai every time, that wasn’t the main issue. The main issue was my mental model getting in the way of dedicated blocks of focus time. I was treating tasks as discrete contexts to switch between.

The key is that groups of tasks can all be accomplished within a broader block of focus. Individual, 15 min tasks don’t need blocking if the broader context they can be actioned within has a dedicated block of focus time in my @reclaimai and my calendar.

I’m slowly shifting to a model that allows dedicated chunks of focus time to be present in my calendar via @reclaimai , working around meetings and events. These chunks are named after half a dozen contexts I move between. Those same names are given to my “projects” in @todoist.

When I reach a particular moment of focus time for a given context, I can now do a few things with it. I can focus on a major priority that needs my full attention, or I pull more discrete tasks directly from my relevant @todoist project for that moment. Or a combo of the two.

The main exception, which makes use of my previous mental model, is when a large, important task that represents a unique, standalone context that will take me a dedicated chunk of time to complete gets added to @todoist and pushed to @reclaimai for dedicated calendar scheduling.

Now, back to @Cron. It’s where my calendar lives. I went to it because of two things.

1. @Apple’s Mac OS Calendar wasn’t keeping up with @reclaimai’s responsive shifts in my calendar and it doesn’t bring all of @googlecalendar’s functionality into it. It’s ok to look at though.

2. @googlecalendar might have functionality, but its interface sucks. Ever looked at a dedicated, full-screen Google Calendar window on a typically-sized 24” display? Wasted vertical space everywhere. It’s not friendly for those of us who use calendars as a visual reference.

Enter @Cron, with its snappy performance, subtle but elegant interface, and (almost) all of the functionality lifted straight from @googlecalendar (and then some). It’s almost perfect. I’m just waiting on them to integrate other types of accounts and then I’ll use it exclusively.

I’m available for these sorts of tips, and lots of other conversations about design practice, career advice and opportunities to do great work together. Hit me up. adam-corcoran.notion.site/Book-a-time-8c…

@threadreaderapp unroll please

@ellyloel thank you so much for the inspiration and support as I’ve meandered through this with you!

Disclaimer: the reason it doesn’t keep up is because Reclaim works primarily with Google Workspace accounts, and between Google Workspace and Mac OS Calendar, the syncing is often very delayed.

Oh, and please bring the ability to set specific Out of Office events directly in @Cron, please dear Cron devs!