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Today I’m digging into why I don’t recommend managing your to-dos inside Google Tasks or Apple Reminders—even though they’re handy and even show up in your calendar.
The short version: they lock every task into the same tiny time block, which hides how long your work will actually take and muddies your sense of capacity.
Google Tasks vs. Apple Reminders isn’t the core issue—the real problem is that both ignore duration, so your calendar can’t reflect reality.
We walk through:
- How a digital calendar plus flexible time blocking gives you the clarity you want: when you’ll do it, how long it will take, and whether it fits with everything else – and Google Tasks and Apple Reminders do not
- Using your calendar to break big items into bite-sized steps (e.g., renewing a license or sending a birthday card) and spread them across time – again, Google Tasks and Apple Reminders do not really allow for this
- Why accurate capacity planning beats “15-minute task tiles” for reducing stress and avoiding overcommitment.
Below is a transcript of the episode. Enjoy!
Other links you might enjoy:
✨ The full Bright Method™️ program If you’re ready for a full time management system that’s realistic, sustainable, and dare I say… fun, check out the Bright Method program. It’s helped hundreds of professional women take back control of their time—and their peace of mind.
🌿 Free 5-Day Time Management Program Get five short, practical video lessons packed with realistic strategies to help you manage your personal and professional life with more clarity and calm.
📱 Follow me on Instagram Get bite-sized, real-life time management tips for working women—like reminders to set mail holds before travel, anonymous day-in-the-life calendars from other professional women, and behind-the-scenes looks at how I manage my own time.
Full transcript:
Kelly Nolan: [00:00:00] Welcome to the Bright Method Podcast, where we’ll discuss practical time management strategies designed for the professional working woman. I’m Kelly Nolan, a former patent litigator who now works with women to set up the bright method in their lives. The Bright Method is a realistic time management system that helps you manage it all personally and professionally. Let’s get you falling asleep, proud of what you got done today, and calm about what’s on tap tomorrow. All right, let’s dig in.
Hey. Hey, welcome back. All right, so today is gonna be somewhat of a niche, like specific topic, but it’s something that I think comes up a fair amount, that it makes sense to do an episode about it. So if this doesn’t apply to you, I’m sorry to waste your time, you can totally stop listening. But it comes up enough that I wanted to speak to it, and that is people relying heavily on Apple reminders or Google tasks to manage their to-dos.
I first wanna say that I get [00:01:00] it. I mean, I think that it’s really cool to be able to keep all of your tasks in one place, maybe two, but like, you know, if you’re using Apple reminders and Google tasks and keeping track of all the tattoos in that place, and then being able to assign a time to them and even have them show up in your calendar.
Now Apple reminders can show up in the Apple Calendar. Google Task shows up in the Google calendar. That’s very cool and it is definitely a step in the right direction when it comes to managing tasks because it does tie it to time in a better way. So I wanna just acknowledge that it, it makes a lot of sense and I totally get why people are doing it and these companies are like pitching them in that way.
So I also understand why the appeal is there. That said. I just wanna throw out there that I actually don’t use those and don’t recommend using them to help you manage your to-do list. There are a couple reasons for this, but one of them really comes down to this, is that. All tasks do not take the same amount of time.
And [00:02:00] yet Apple reminders and Google tasks only allow you to, I think, block maybe 15 or 30 minutes per task. And they don’t let you play with that. And we all know that some tasks do take only 15 minutes, but some take 45 some take, you know? So they could take an hour and a half. They could take an hour.
There’s a lot of variation in the size of to-dos. Calling a vendor for something is different than researching a topic versus writing the section of a presentation about that topic. Those all take different amounts of time, and so if all of those are represented in your calendar as 15 minute tasks, that’s a big problem for helping you understand how to plan your day, whether your day is full and things like that, because to me.
A lot of solid time management and getting just realistic game plans that help us plan our day and give us peace of mind that we can get everything done that we plan on, and have the breathing [00:03:00] space, and have the assurance we have time to do it is it really comes down to understanding your capacity.
The space in that calendar versus your current workload and understanding, is my current workload fitting within that capacity, or is it overflowing it? And similarly, if you’re considering taking something else on, being able to look at your filled capacity and like the capacity in relation to what’s already in there, and understand how much space you have left to give to this potential new thing.
And whether that’s across a day, a week, or month, same thing. To do that effectively, we need that capacity to be accurately taken up in a visual way by the things we have on our plate. And so while I love that reminders, apple reminders and Google tasks show up in the calendar, they are not giving you that clarity, right?
Like if I give you five Apple reminders for today and they each look like they’re gonna take 15 minutes, there’s likely a lot of white space in there. But that probably is not an [00:04:00] accurate representation of how much of your capacity is filled up. Buy these tasks that already are on your plate, that are in your calendar, but just aren’t connected to how much time are they going to take?
And that inability to protect the time needed for each individual task prevents us from understanding if we’re overscheduling ourselves or have space to take more on, or any of those things that we have to figure out every single day, usually pretty quickly. And we need to be able to look at our calendar and have that clarity.
Versus being like, well, that says 15 minutes, but is it 15 minutes? Let me read it again. Okay. What about the next one? Like that’s just not giving you the clarity that we’re looking for. Whereas if we put it in the calendar and blocked the amount of time that we think it’s gonna take, plus a little more, ’cause we all underestimate, then suddenly we look at our calendar and have a better understanding of our time.
Because to me, to get that clarity and that peace of mind that we just talked about, you really have to know when are you going to do the thing. How long is it going to take you and does it fit with [00:05:00] everything else you have going on that day? And that last question really ties to that capacity that we’ve been talking about.
And while as I said, apple reminders and Google tasks help with that first question of when am I gonna do the thing they don’t address at all, the second or the third questions of how long is it going to take and does it fit with everything else I have going on that day? That’s why it doesn’t give us that clarity.
It doesn’t give us that peace of mind that we’re craving when it comes for to managing our time. And it still allows for that stress and anxiety of like, is this a realistic plan? Can I do it all? And as I said, a digital calendar does account for those things. It helps you know when you’re gonna do it, protect the time that you need it and see how it fits with everything else in that day, or you adjust and move it to a different time when it could fit.
That’s why for me, the tool of a digital calendar combined with smart strategy of how to leverage it is really where the magic happens. I also wanna point out another thing that I think is really important is that calendars [00:06:00] in a sense, give us the space, like the digital space. I don’t know if that makes sense, but that’s makes sense in my head to tease out all of the bite-sized steps that go into.
A task or a project. So often when we use like Apple reminders, we might use it as things of like, I need to remember to renew my driver’s license. And so we put it in as a reminder and there it is. It’s a reminder We can even tie it to when we should start working on it. And, and that is again, better than just putting it on a to-do list somewhere.
But I want you to see that there are so many substeps that go into that task. You know, you might need to like research what you have to do to renew your license. You might have to make an appointment. You’re probably gonna have to fill out paperwork and look for those utility bills or those kind of things.
There are a lot of little steps that come out of that. Some of them may take 15 minutes, some could take 30 minutes and. There are like dependencies on when they happen based on what you find and when the [00:07:00] appointment is. There’s just a lot that is teased out from that one line item task. And of course, you could use reminders to have these five reminders that address all the subsets of that task, but.
To me, it just makes more sense kind of, I mean, and if you wanna have it in a list format, like that’s fine, but it almost, you have more space in a calendar to tease it out and lay out all those different tasks across time with their varying amounts of time so that you not only remember when to start it, but you have clarity over what does this look like?
What does this entail? When is this gonna happen? Am I gonna get it done before that appointment? And can see it more visually with more space in your calendar. Then you can in a list format, in Google tasks or Apple reminders. Another example I like to think about is for someone’s birthday that you wanna celebrate.
Let’s say it’s a parent’s birthday or a friend’s birthday and you like to send a card, getting an annual [00:08:00] reminder or a task that it’s someone’s birthday coming up, like the birthday is in a week or something like that is again. Better than seeing it just as a full day event on the day of and being like, ah, ah, now it’s too late to send some sort of card or things like that.
But if you really take a step back and this, you know, this is front end work, but it again has, if we repeat it annually, it has like long-term payoff. That’s how I really view time management. Like solid time management. Might have front end work, might have front end frustration, but pays off over the long haul.
If you sat back and realized, I don’t need a week before reminder. I need to really think about, okay, for this parent, what I like to do is get a card, send it, and call ’em on the day of. Those are the things I do for that part, that birthday. Then really thinking about, okay, I don’t need a reminder for a week.
Even like mom’s birthday isn’t a week. That still requires me to think through. What I’m going to do and figure that out, where instead, depending, again, what you could do if you calendar this and repeat it on an annual [00:09:00] basis. Think about this difference a week before you get an A calendar alert or with protected time in your calendar that says something like mom’s birthday’s in a week.
Buy a birthday card four days before it says mom’s birthday’s in four days. Write the birthday card. Three days before it’s mom’s birthdays and three days, mail the card and then on the day of you calendar at a specific time. Mom’s birthdays today, call her, and these are blocks in your calendar that are calendared.
You can always move them around as your days shake out. They’re flexible. We’re very into flexible time blocking here, but even though it takes a bit of time to set up and you repeat those annually again, you get this benefit for years. Now you don’t get this vague Mom’s birthday is in a week, and you have to go through the mental gymnastics of what you’re gonna do.
You now have clarity over what you need to do, and you just get to execute and use your brain power in that regard and not figuring out what you need to do. These are small examples, but when you think about them across your work and work projects and things like that, I hope you start [00:10:00] seeing that how a calendar.
I know I, I can’t explain very well, but as I said, gives you the space to build and flesh all this out versus Apple reminders that you might just kind of limit yourself to mom’s birthdays in a week, or that presentation is next week, and then you are left in that moment to figure out what to do in that time.
So I hope that helps. I think if you’ve been using Apple Reminders or Google tests, again, if you’ve been using it and they work for you, terrific. Like don’t, I’m not here to break things that don’t work. But if they’re not giving you the clarity of what is your workload, what’s your objective workload?
How do you have conversations around the specifics of being overloaded, all that kind of stuff. That might be why is that they’re not giving you clarity on your capacity in relation to your current workload or potential workload for all the reasons that we’ve discussed, and they might not be giving you the clarity to really spell out your game plan for everything and build it out into a place where you can see how it’s gonna happen.[00:11:00]
Now I do just wanna clarify, I’ve shared this in past episodes. I really love Apple reminders, particularly combined with Siri. I don’t know if I ever use Apple reminders without Siri, but if I am on the go or in the kitchen with kids or driving and. An idea comes to me for like anything, like just any idea.
Like I could in my lawyer days, it would be like, put this in this brief, we could make this argument. Or, in my current life, it’s like, maybe I should write a post about this or reach out to this person, or I should find someone to speak on this topic, or whatever it is. As those things come to mind, I love using Siri in combination with Apple reminders just to capture ideas and to-dos on the go for me, as I’ve talked about in prior episodes.
It’s less about having the perfect place for those things to land and more. The thing I prioritize is just capture it. Capture, put it down in writing, or whether it’s digital or paper and pen, capture the idea first and then bridge into the calendar later. [00:12:00] And so when I’m on the go, as I said, obviously driving and the kitchen, I’m not getting out my calendar and calendar and everything.
I’m just prioritizing capturing it and then later bridging it to my calendar. And so I. I just wanted to clarify that is I love Apple reminders for that capture function. I don’t then let that be how I manage the to-dos. For me, one line item in my weekly planning session is go into the reminders, pull everything out, calendar it, and then clear the reminders out.
Doesn’t mean I’m doing those things in that moment hardly. I don’t know if I do any of ’em in that moment, but I calendar out when I’m gonna do them and then clear it out, and it just becomes kind of like my catchall to-do list in a sense, as I’m like moving through life. And then it’s that really critical piece of bridging it into the calendar, or if it’s like a content idea, putting that where I keep content ideas, things like that.
But until Apple reminders or Google tasks allow you to change the amount of time that you can block, then I don’t think it is [00:13:00] the end all, be all of how we’re gonna manage our time, because it doesn’t give you that clarity between your capacity and your workload. So I hope that that makes sense. Again, you do not have to manage time like I do.
I’m more sharing these thoughts for if you are struggling and with using these and they’re, and they’re not getting where you wanna go, that might be why, or if you’re considering using it, just understanding my hesitations around it so that you can make an informed decision even if you decide to go for it, which is great too.
All right, hope that helps, and it was a little short and sweet. But hopefully interesting to some extent, and thank you for being here, and I’ll catch you in the next episode.
Links you might enjoy:
✨ The full Bright Method™️ program If you’re ready for a full time management system that’s realistic, sustainable, and dare I say… fun, check out the Bright Method program. It’s helped hundreds of professional women take back control of their time—and their peace of mind.
🌿 Free 5-Day Time Management Program Get five short, practical video lessons packed with realistic strategies to help you manage your personal and professional life with more clarity and calm.
📱 Follow me on Instagram Get bite-sized, real-life time management tips for working women—like reminders to set mail holds before travel, anonymous day-in-the-life calendars from other professional women, and behind-the-scenes looks at how I manage my own time.
