Recommendations

LyfeSchedule is designed to be opinionated but flexible - you are not locked into any of these approaches.

Add tasks gradually based on your responsibilities and goals

How to put your life in LyfeSchedule.

Gradually add tasks

Think through each of the following categories and create tasks based on how often they need to be completed. This might be an extensive process so you don't need to do it all in one sitting - take it at your own pace. This is the recommended approach:

1. Start with today. What do you need to do today? For chores and other things that repeat, take the time to really think about the date ranges and how often they repeat.
2. What you need to do over the next week? Remember that you don't need to re-add repeating things from the previous step. Same as before, put more thought into the repeating tasks.
3. What do you need to do over the next 2 to 4 weeks?
4. What do you need to do over the next 1 to 3 months?
5. Continue this process, expanding the time window, until all relevant tasks have been accounted for. I'd bet that 99% of your relevant tasks are within the next 6 months.

Responsibilities

Most of us have responsibilities that we have to deal with on a day-to-day basis, like school, work, taking care of children or pets, and self-care. These make up what we "need to do" and typically take priority over all else. Many of these repeat in a cyclic way and so are a perfect fit for repeating tasks.

1. Major commitments: school, work, organizations, etc.
2. Dependents: children, family, pets, other living things that regularly depend on you in some way
3. Health and hygiene: bathing, exercise, eating, drinking, medical and dentist appointments, etc.
4. Maintenance: paying rent or home payments, paying bills, getting cars inspected, etc.
5. Chores: getting groceries, house cleaning, replacing filters/parts, etc.

The degree and detail to which you add tasks is up to you. For example, all hygiene tasks might be automatic for one person while another person might benefit from adding a "Take a shower" task that repeats every day to remind them.

Goals

There are many resources on making, planning, and executing goals which cannot reasonably be reviewed here. Obviously, LyfeSchedule cannot help you determine what you want to do, but it can help you make it happen.

For example, let's say I want to write a novel. After doing some research on the process, I decide to finish my first draft in the next three months, and write at least 2 pages per day to that end. I could add the following tasks (assuming today is May 1):

1. "Finish first draft of novel", date range May 1 to July 31, not repeating, no time estimate.
2. "Write at least 2 pages of novel", date range May 1, repeating every 1 day, time estimate of 45 minutes.

All actionable tasks based on your goals can be added in this way.

Tasks should be actionable

TODO

Avoid "tasks for tasks' sake"

The point of this app is not to comprehensively cover every single thing you do in your life.

Goldilocks zone of just enough task management.

TODO more

Use time estimates

Use the time estimate field as much as possible. This forces you to imagine or record how long things take you, which makes managing them easier.

TODO more