Scoping calendar

I've been noticing lately that it's sometimes easy to lose track of the way my longer term goals connect with my shorter term ones. For example, I might decide at the start of the month that I want to work on some project, but then on a week-to-week or day-to-day basis I get distracted by other things or forget to put aside time for it. Prioritising day-tasks against day-tasks or week-tasks against week-tasks seems to be fine, it's just when the timescales collide that things go awry.

So here's my rough sketch of a system to fix it. I call it a scoping calendar. I'm a big fan of calendars and timetabling, but they only let you schedule things at an exact time. The scoping calendar lets you schedule something on any month, any week or any day, without needing to pick exactly when you'll do it. That means you can think about and plan your work on a very high level.

But the real beauty of the idea is that the different levels interconnect, and you can be high- and low-level at the same time. When you have more specific plans you can go back and add them in. Any time that you schedule on a per-day basis fills in progress for the week, and same for the week to the month. And the amount of time left unallocated in the month shrinks as the month goes on, letting you know if you've scheduled more than is possible.

Ultimately what you end up with is a view that shows you your goals, your commitments towards those goals and your progress on every time scale simultaneously, letting you bridge the gap between long-term and short-term planning.