I used to find myself so many times in situations where I needed to do a lot of work, but actually didn’t do anything because sorting out the initial chaos seemed so impossibly that I just pushed the whole load in front of me. Doing some scheduling works wonders if you have similar problems, just writing it down will clear you head and you will know what to do and when.

Keep in mind that the approach below works best when you need to sort out a lot of stuff in a short time, but I am finding it increasingly useful for my day to day stuff too. I use a 3 step process here’s how.

I create two lists and one table at the end. You could merge all these into just one table, but I find that having them separately helps, so you can view your tasks in context. As my first step, I jot down the projects I need to work on, usually in order of priority.

1. Write blog(s)
2. Create my main personal site
3. Record CD

After I’m done, I write down the sub-steps that need to be taken for each project. I try to get medium detail here, I don’t want to be to anal about it, this is just scheduling, not breaking down stuff into actions, like in GTD. For some reason I find it useful to group these by project, but not actually write down the project name. I think I like it more because the project names are five lines above and it just makes redundant information.

• Daily Hack Your Day Post
• Daily gHacks Post
• Make Use Of post twice a week
• Create a site template
• Install content management system
• Create all the content
• Record guitar tracks
• Sing the song
• Mix the songs
• Create album art

Now that I can see all my items, I create a table with the following properties. The first column contains the day of the week and the date. The next column contains the deadlines and the following ones the tasks. I also have some rules set up for my task columns. For example, I only allow myself two tasks a day (apart from blogging). This is most useful when you have many projects, you can restrict yourself to 2-3 for example. You can take a look at the table I made in the picture, it contains all the tasks and projects.

The reason I allow only 2 tasks per day is that this is for emergency work, when I need to go through things fast. I can’t have my mind wandering everywhere, I need to keep focused. I would limit it to 4-5 in a normal schedule and the table would probably be more elaborate.

I think you need to spend about 30 minutes on a fairly complicated table, but the clarity of thought and productivity it can give you will be worth it. You can also tweak and tune it any which way you like, I prefer to keep it as simple as possible.