Suppose I need to study for an exam, and I have a dentist appointment later in the afternoon. The appointment is on my calendar; studying is on my to-do list. I’d like to study for a few hours before I leave, but neither tool on its own shows me how studying fits around the appointment. I have to imagine how each item fits together to make up the day.
Early on I followed Cal Newport’s How to Become a Straight-A Student: each morning I would bridge the gap, combining calendar and to-do items on a single sheet of paper. But copying over commitments I’d already recorded was labor-intensive, and assigning a time to every item made the plan feel rigid.
I later moved to Things. It made the daily upkeep easier, and its calendar integration seemed promising. But the calendar felt tacked on: events were fixed at the top of the list while tasks sat below. I could see both in one place, yet I still had to work out how they fit together. I missed being able to interleave everything in one list, as I had on paper.
