I included Neil Fiori’s Unschedule in a Sunday Serial in January. I’ve bastardized it in the intervening months such that I don’t track the time I spend on items necessarily; it’s more of a loose guide of things I think I need to spend time on that day, with all of the time commitments I have (meetings, errands, domestic responsibilities, as well as exercise) accounted for. It still helps me see when I can really sit down and focus for a while, and more importantly, when it would be wise to. And in a pinch, if my Sunday night OmniFocus review doesn’t happen, it at least helps me prioritize Monday.
Most of the items that populate my Unschedule come from OmniFocus. I schedule time for emergent projects on my Unschedule, and consult fantastical for meetings and the like. The astute OmniFocus user might suggest that the Forecast View can, in fact, display your calendar items, so what’s the point of the Unschedule?
Besides, of course, an opportunity to use OmniOutliner.
I’ll tell you, and it’s counterintuitive.
In Getting Things Done, projects are comprised of next actions, and next actions are the small, visible things you can do to move a project forward. OmniFocus excels at capturing these next actions, and is most effectively used to organize these next actions into projects. The general wisdom holds that you work off of action lists: phone calls, email, or errands, for example.
Not so with the Unschedule. You can conceive of it like a punch card system, where you would record 30-minute blocks of work around your other commitments (most importantly, preferred activities… aka fun).
Next actions, atomic nuggets of work that they are, often don’t take up 30 minutes. A phone call might go 10 minutes. Writing a letter might take 15 minutes. Sure, you could log 30-minute blocks of phone calls, and only do that for 30 minutes. But that’s not necessarily how people work. Or me, anyway.
I do find that setting aside time to work on projects is helpful. I can work on the budget for an hour, and I’ll use OmniFocus’s corresponding project to clue me into my next actions. To that end, I find myself populating the Unschedule with projects (sometimes I’ll use Hookmark to link to the project in OmniOutliner). So it’s more of a focused projects list than a repeat of tasks I’ve already recorded elsewhere.
I was thinking about OmniFocus’s Focus perspective and I tried grouping by project. But Forecast doesn’t support such tomfoolery. So I cobbled together a perspective called-what else?-Unschedule, which shows any available tasks that are flagged, due, or deferred, grouped by project. And by using the Collapse All command, it’s effectively an Unschedule without the duplicate data entry. This doesn’t help with time blocking, if that’s how you’re using the Unschedule, but it’s close.
Here’s a slightly ginned-up Unschedule if I weren’t working for a living:
And here’s the Unschedule perspective I created:
