Calendar

A calendar is to be used for the following.

  • Time blocking,
  • Marking events that will occur regardless of your presence,
  • Marking due dates.

I am using the Full Calendar plugin. Every event is a separate note under a specific folder. The events appear in a calendar timeline.

Task Manager

A task manager is used for tracking all tasks associated with projects. Be as specific as you need to be. Tasks do not necessarily have due dates. Set scheduled dates and priority for tasks as required.

I am using the Tasks plugin for this purpose. I can open up Daily Note and automatically pull tasks scheduled for that day.

Why They Need to Be Separate

Combining the calendar and the task manager causes various issues.

Making a calendar perform the functions of a task manager leads to loss of flexibility of scheduling. Unfinished tasks conveniently filter forward to the next period in a task manager. A calendar does not know whether a scheduled block needs to be moved to the next day to accommodate for unfinished tasks. A task manager simply continues to show tasks that have not been marked complete.

Inserting large lists of tasks into the calendar causes visual clutter. This can make it harder to locate important events (like due dates). To reduce clutter you might end up coarsegraining your tasks too much. Using a task manager takes details off the calendar; you do not need to sacrifice granularity of tasks to be able to easily visualize events.

If you are only using a calendar, as you move through time, depictions of time blocks tied to tasks deviate from reality. To align time blocks better with corresponding tasks, you need to spend too long up front during scheduling. Using a task manager enables more general time blocking, thereby enhancing the accuracy of depictions on a calendar.

The exclusive use of a task manager makes it hard to mentally place in time tasks that are actually time sensitive. Deadlines can creep up on you, or you might miss important events entirely. Maintaining a calendar for such events helps better anticipate their approach.

Task managers do not have a natural way to deal with events without attached tasks. Think about a birthday or a game scheduled on a certain date. It is possible to force these events into tasks such as “attend this birthday” or “watch this game,” but now your task list is cluttered. Also, you are making premature decisions. Maybe the day comes and you have no intention of watching the game. Now you still have to deal with this task in your task manager—delete it, or worse, mark it done—so it does not keep showing up. Calendars reduce this task manager clutter.

The downside of using both a calendar and a task manager is that you have two tools to manage rather than one. But the reduction in unnecessary decision-making and improvement of clarity make it worthwhile.