There are many in the time management field who suggest, plan for the week, then review tasks at the beginning of the day as opposed to just creating daily to-dos. The advantage of the weekly view is you have more perspective. You can schedule personal as well as business priorities at a time when you are not in "the heat of battle". If you only schedule a day at a time, you are likely to be driven only by what is urgent rather than what is important. If you make time for non-urgent yet important items, in the long run you will have less fires to put out.
The advantage of this approach is that you can allocate chunks of time at the beginning of the week to "work on the business," not in it. If an emergency comes up, you should immediately reschedule these important "appointments" with yourself.
ON THE PALMTOP: Fortunately, week-at-a-time planning is easy with the HP Palmtop. One approach is to enter the week-at-glance view by pressing (F8) from APPT.
APPT List--Hourly Appointments: Graphic
Half-hourly Appointments: Graphic
15 Minute Intervals in Appointment: Graphic
Pressing (Fn)-(<Spacebar>), ZOOM, changes the hourly listings from every 15 minutes to every 30 minutes to every 60 minutes. This gives you different perspectives on the week. In the hourly view you can see what time slots are full for the whole week from 8:00 AM to 6:00 PM. On the 15 minute view you see less of the day, but can read more of the specifics of the appointment. When you are planning for the week, on the Week screen move your cursor to the day and a nearby time slot (for what you want to schedule). Press (ENTER) and type in the activity or appointment, adjusting the time if necessary.
You can also use the ToDo function of APPT in a similar manner
during your weekly planning session. We'll discuss some more ideas about
weekly planning in another article.