Date & Time
The most recent non-fiction book I read was Oliver Burkeman’s Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals.
Contrary to what its title may suggest, however, this is the opposite of a self-help guide. In fact, it’s almost a warning against the entire genre. What Burkeman has written is more of a smart, funny, almost zen-like reflexion on transience, on the futility of control, and the fallacy of the perfect future that, in reality, will never arrive. Instead, we should accept to “…choose a few things, sacrifice everything else, and deal with the inevitable sense of loss that results.” Basically, organization is fine, and often necessary, but no amount of “life hacking” will ever allow us to cheat the reality of our finitude. We will not achieve everything.
If you followed my “adventures in productivity” during the past year, you know I was a little busy bouncing around, round-tripping from TickTick to Notion, and back again. I went down the rabbit hole and geeked my heart out on all kinds of strategies and workflows. But shortly after leaving Notion, I actually left TickTick as well: it turns out all I really wanted was a good, native, calendar app, with a built-in way to add and see reminders.
Enter Fantastical.
Funny thing about Fantastical: I was never a fan. While many, over the years, were waxing poetic about its interface, I mostly found it busy. Its natural language parsing was certainly impressive, but other apps eventually caught up—close enough to do the job, anyway. So I had a rarely used copy of Fantastical 2 and when they released version 3 (switching to a subscription model in the process), I scoffed and deleted it altogether. Besides, the asking price felt much too high for the proposed feature set.
Enter this new workflow shift.
Out of curiosity I decided to give the app another look, and it turns out it did tick all the boxes I wanted to be ticked: two-way Reminders integration, a quarter view (for longer projects), and drag and drop support. This last one may seem odd, but I like being able to drag a topic I’ve noted in Craft and drop it on a date to create an event. It’s a small detail, but it makes planning much more elegant and efficient. Inter-app operations weren’t supported at all in Notion and TickTick, which always bothered me. I also liked that I could easily duplicate a reminder to an event and vice versa. (1)
But what finally got me on-board was the new addition of Fantastical Scheduling, which includes Openings and Proposals. Openings are a bookings/appointments feature, hosted on the company’s servers and fully synced with any custom calendar set created in the app (2). It’s quite powerful. Meeting templates added to Openings can even include Zoom sessions (through account integration), creating all related links and info automatically as soon as a meeting is booked (no trip to Zoom required). With this, the Premium tier asking price suddenly made much more sense to me, and I haven’t regretted the move: I’ve been using Openings quite a bit and it’s already proven to be a huge timesaver.
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Obviously, I’ve also come to terms with the app’s UI—like everything I just needed to sit down, study, commit, and customize it to my needs. And it’s good to finally use an app that works and behaves like a first-class citizen on all my devices. (3)
But the bigger—and more important—conceptual change has been the move from a task-based to a time-based workflow. This isn’t new (I’ve always used some form of time-blocking), but it’s now gone from ancillary to central, with Fantastical acting as the main driver.
Endless lists might afford us the illusion of an aspirational life… but time is our only reality.
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1. This has since become my preferred method of managing editorial content. More on this later.
2. Calendar sets are basically groups of calendars that can be toggled on or off. Other apps offer this as well, but Openings meeting templates use these to determine availability. It’s pretty powerful once you get the hang of it.
3. With all the niceties that come with it: Focus integration, Shortcuts etc.
