➡️ Apps to Help with Time Management and Planning (NAfME Blog)

This blog post originally appeared on the blog for the National Association for Music Educators (nafme.org) on April 6, 2021.

In "Digital Organization Tools for Music Educators," I detailed apps that can help you plan large goals, turn them into actionable projects, and reflect on your progress.

Next, I'd like to talk about apps to help you manage your time and save your ideas digitally.

Put Only Hard Commitments in Your Calendar

Managing your time is a key part of being a music educator. Sometimes it feels like we have more responsibilities than there is actually time in the day to complete.

In "Digital Organization Tools for Music Educators," I recommend apps to help you wrangle your to-do list. Now I would like to recommend some apps and tips for managing the events on your calendar.

If your calendar needs are simple, I recommend you go no further than Google. It runs entirely in a web browser but can also be used in combination with your calendar app of choice. My music team uses a Google Calendar to publish all of our classes, sectionals, concerts, and events. This allows us to edit this data right from our calendar apps on our phones and computers, while also publishing them to a website for parents to view.

Google Calendar works perfectly fine for most needs. It is available to anyone for free on the web and has a functional mobile app on most smartphone platforms.

Microsoft Outlook and the Apple Calendars, despite being created by big tech companies, are actually capable of showing you a calendar from any service (Google included). My personal calendars are in iCloud, and our school uses Exchange. I can log into my iCloud, Google, and Exchange calendars all from within the same app to see everything I am committed to.

Apple Calendar and Microsoft Outlook are two of the most widely used calendar apps on desktop and mobile operating systems. Either of them can handle calendars from Google, iCloud, or Exchange accounts and show them all alongside one another.

Tip!—Avoid putting tasks in your calendar. Tasks have due dates, but they rarely need to be worked on at a specific time. I find that putting tasks in my calendar adds lots of noise and I eventually just end up ignoring all of it. If you want to stay sane, put only time-based appointments on your calendar. You can make an appointment with yourself to tackle a big task, but try to avoid putting things like "print concert programs" and "design seating chart" alongside events with concrete start and end times.

If you want more power out of your calendars, I recommend you check out Fantastical. (Currently iOS and Mac only. Android users can check out SolCalendar). Here are my favorite features:

Natural language input is not only fast, but you can set a keyboard shortcut on your computer to invoke a mini-calendar for quickly adding events.

• Natural language input: Typing "Choir Rehearsal tomorrow at 7 pm @2032 Beaverton Road /Work" will add an event called Choir Rehearsal to your calendar at the designated time and location. The "/Work" will put on the "Work" calendar.
• Calendar Sets: I subscribe to my school and school district's master calendar to better plan after-school rehearsals, concerts, and space use. I subscribe to these calendars in Fantastical, but I have them toggled off by default. I created a Calendar Set called "All" that turns on the chaos and shows me every single calendar I have at once. Many things overlap, but it enables me to be informed as I plan without needing to visit my district's website.
• Conference Call Detection: Fantastical also has built-in Zoom and Google Meet integration. If it detects a meeting URL in the calendar event, it adds a one-touch button to the event which will launch you right into the meeting. This event was shared with me and has a Zoom call URL associated with it. Fantastical automatically added the Zoom icon so that I can click on it to immediately enter the call. Fantastical integrates with all of these services.

A handful of Fantastical's features are free, and some of the more advanced features are paid.

Other great calendar apps:

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Quickly Clip Ideas from Everywhere

There is much to say about note apps. The one feature I see least utilized by busy teachers is the clipper. A clipper is a tool that runs in the Share Sheet of your phone or as a web extension. Clippers are perfect for "saving it for later." A good one can handle mixed media including photos, websites, emails, text notes, files, and more. Here are my favorite apps that have easy ways to capture data for later:

• Evernote: Known for being cross-platform and having a free tier. Its web extension can grab almost anything from the web and clip it to your notebook in a neatly formatted article view that is text searchable. The Evernote web clipper can be installed as an extension or from the share-sheet on mobile devices. You can choose how it will save the content, and even categorize it with tags and a memo before clipping.

• Microsoft OneNote: Similar features to Evernote. It's free if your district has Office 365. Plays nice with the rest of the Office Suite.

• Apple Notes: Apple Notes has caught up with most of the major features of competing note apps. From almost anywhere on an iOS or Mac device, press the Share button to save something to Apple Notes. Almost any type of media can be clipped.
• Drafts: Drafts is text-only, but I prefer it for my note-taking because I can capture quickly and then easily send the text out to other apps once I have decided where it belongs.

• Google Keep: Leverages all smart AI features and integration with Google Services that you would expect. Google Keep is simple, but it provides plenty of features. Notes can be turned into reminders, Google Docs, or shared with others.

• Instapaper: Primarily for saving web content like news articles. It strips out the ads, buttons, and other chrome, so you get an experience less like reading a website and more like reading a newspaper.

Of these apps, Evernote is most able to handle whatever kind of data you throw at it. Because it's available on the web, it's easy to share your data with others and even get your data out and into another app, if you choose to.

Before and after a website has been parsed by Instapaper's clipper.

Tip!—In the same way I try to avoid putting tasks on my calendar, I also try to avoid clipping things I want to check out later to my to-do list. It clutters things up. I put only actionable tasks on my task list. If it doesn't have a verb ("email Jacklyn choir rosters for 2021–22," "tune the bass drum," "draft grant proposal"), save it to a note instead.

Staying On Top of Teaching Responsibilities with OmniFocus Perspectives (OmniFocus Mini-Series)

Teaching is a challenging, multifaceted career. I never end a day feeling like I accomplished everything I was supposed to. But sometimes, software can help! And for my tasks, that software is OmniFocus. 

Most of the checkable todo items in my life go in OmniFocus. It is a powerful task app for Mac, iOS, and Apple Watch that is based on David Allen’s “Getting Things Done” methodology. There are 100 reasons I love it. Lately, it’s because I am getting a lot of mileage out of the Perspective feature. Perspectives allow you to build different custom views for how OmniFocus displays your tasks.

The Forecast Perspective comes installed on OmniFocus. It shows you a convenient day at a glance so that you never need to stress about todos until the day they are due.

A Perspective is kind of like a custom search that you can save. The building blocks will seem similar if you have ever made an email rule.

I have over 1,000 tasks in OmniFocus. My goal with Perspectives is to create windows into my work that empower me to think only about the things that are relevant to me at a given time or in a given situation. 

Here are a few Perspectives that are most useful to me. 

Priority

The Priority Perspective filters only items that are due soon or that are high priority items I want to be working on for the day. OmniFocus highlights flagged tasks with an orange ring and due tasks with a yellow ring to draw your attention.

This Perspective shows me all of my most important tasks. I designed it for moments where I have an overwhelming number of things to do spanning numerous unrelated projects and I just need to focus on the things I can’t survive the day (or moment) without doing. This Perspective is set up to show only tasks that are due soon, overdue, and tasks that are both tagged ‘Today’ and have a flag. The result is a list of tasks that are due soon mixed in with the most important things I want to be working on ‘today.’ 

This is how my Priority Perspective is set up.

There are usually only a few tasks that result from this search which helps my eyes (and brain) focus on top priorities.

Today

This is a project that filters only items with the tag ‘Today.’ These items already show up on my Forecast view alongside overdue and due soon items, but there are times where I do not have any items due that day, or where I they aren’t available yet, resulting in a cluttered looking Forecast. The Today Perspective shows me only a list of things I want to be working on Today, organized by project.

This is my Today Perspective. It is similar to the Forecast, only tasks don’t necessarily need to be due to show up here, and it is organized by project. See an image of my Forecast at the top of this post.

This is how my Today Perspective is set up.

Deferred

This Perspective shows me when certain items became available to begin working on, in the order that they became available. This is useful for seeing if there are tasks that became available a long time ago that I am really slacking on, or maybe that I need to drop and admit I took on too much. 

My Deferred Perspective. Tip - Giving an item a Defer date in OmniFocus means that it isn’t available to work on until that date. You can use these to easily filter only items that are ‘available,’ which can relieve the stress of seeing everything at once.

Teaching

I have numerous projects relating to teaching in the Howard County Public School System. I have action lists for each of my ensembles, for directing the HCPSS Honor Band, for planning concerts, field trips, and for articulating our students from middle to high school. The Teaching Perspective focuses me on only the tasks related to teaching responsibilities, and organizes them by due date. This way I am thinking about only work tasks, while remaining focused on the next task I should be completing.

My Teaching Perspective shows only Howard County Public School System responsibilities. This is really useful for when I need to focus only on work.

Grading

My school uses Canvas for grading students and Synergy for tracking certain data on them. Both are slow, web-based, programs that take a while to load. For this reason, I tend to want to spend concentrated times working with grades and then ignore them, rather than being constantly in and out of the grade book.

For this reason, I add a lot of grade based tasks to OmniFocus and tag them with keywords like Grades, Canvas, or Synergy. I tend to use these a lot when triaging email. For example, if my school’s data clerk emails teachers with due dates and deadlines for final grades, I forward that into my OmniFocus inbox using my special email address that the app provides. Once it is out of my email inbox and into my OmniFocus inbox I give it a defer date and a due date, and tag it with the tag ‘Canvas.’

Sometimes students email me work if they have issues submitting it on Canvas. Or parents ask me questions in email about certain grades. In these situations, I forward the emails into my OmniFocus inbox and then tag them with the necessary tag. 

The Grades Perspective aggregates all of these tags into one view. This is useful because these tasks rarely have hard due dates. By not assigning them due dates, they never clutter up my Forecast perspective (where I spend most of my time). When I am ready to focus on grading, I can open up this Perspective and filter all other tasks out.

The Grades Perspective shows only responsibilities that involve entering grades and working with my school’s learning management software.

Top 3

Sometimes I get so overwhelmed that I just need to think “what are three things that I need to focus on today.” This usually happens on days where I need to be spending long periods of serious focus on one or more broad tasks. I often go traditional-task-list and break out a pencil and paper for moments like this. Lately, I use this OmniFocus Perspective called Top 3. I have a tag called “1,” “2,” and “3.” All this Perspective does is filter them so that I don’t see anything else.

Icons

OmniFocus Perspectives can be given a custom icon that matches the style of the perspective icons that come with the app. I am able to make my Perspectives look really attractive and eye-grabbing with the MacStories Perspective Icons, a new product that features 20,000 icons for OmniFocus. You can read more about them and buy them here. 

Conclusion

OmniFocus has challenged me to think about my own productivity and capacity to focus. Through Perspectives, I am able to build windows into my work that help me to see only what I need to at a given time. 

You can read more about OmniFocus here and learn more about building Perspectives from learnomnifocus.com here.