When Tana released Calendar View one month ago, I was grateful to have another way of viewing information but when I realised that I could time-block on a weekly basis, I was ecstatic.
Why?
Because time-blocking is how I get things done. It’s just my jam, it works for me every time I do it.
I know this isn’t the case for many people but the structure that it adds to my day keeps me focused on the goals that I want to achieve.
My Initial Set-up
For the first few weeks, I set up a search node for my events, tasks and meetings that did not have the status of Archive or DNF (did not finish). Here’s how that looked:
The problem with this was that every time I wanted to enter an activity via the weekly calendar view (which was often), it was automatically tagged as an event as that’s the first supertag in the search expression.
This isn’t bad per se, but it got a bit tedious having to add the appropriate tag and it also meant that everything had to have a tag. I don’t need everything to have a tag with time blocking as I have multiple recurring activities like “work, morning routine, gym”. I just want these to show up on the calendar so that I know the activity is coming up next but I don’t need to track these activities. I wouldn’t want to do a live search for all events and see “work” come up a ton of times. When I search for events, I want to see only unique events.
This lead me to my current solution which I’ll be testing out for the first time this week.
My Current Set-up
This is a node that I named “Main Calendar Test” which I am viewing as a weekly calendar. It’s not a search node and therefore has no search expression but I can enter activities directly into the weekly view without a supertag being applied by default.
This also gives me the opportunity to tag unique tasks and events and have them color-coded appropriately.
The only problem that I foresee with this is that I may not be able to access it via the day tag in the same way that I was able to access the search expression from the initial set-up, but we will see!