Tasks and appointments

Once you have identified your roles and goals, you may then get down to the business of actually adding items to your schedule.

Tasks are the activities that comprise goals.  When all the tasks listed under a goal are complete, that goal has been accomplished. As an example, the Exercise Regularly goal from the previous section may have tasks named Ride Bike, Swim, and Jog.

Tasks may be one-time events, or they may require time to be spent on them for several days, weeks, months, or years.  That's why tasks are kept separate from appointments.  Tasks are the "what" component of activities; appointments are the "when" component.

Whenever a task is scheduled, an appointment is created for that task.  Each task can have as many appointments as it needs, and each appointment can begin at a different time and have a different duration.

For the purposes of summarizing how much time has been scheduled for a task (in the Tasks window and the Roles & Goals window), only appointments that are listed in a schedule are counted.  Appointments that are in to-do lists are not counted, and neither are the tasks themselves (which are listed in the Tasks window).  For a task to have time scheduled for it, it must have an appointment listed on a schedule.