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by spacelamb 1696 days ago
The Daily Activity Schedule by psychiatrist Dr. David Burns in his book Feeling Good is the main technique I use, and the current software I use to type it out is OneNote. The main idea is to create a three-column table with the time of day in the left-most column; an hourly schedule as the middle “Prospective” column; and an hourly log of what you actually did in the right-hand “Retrospective” column with a score of 1-5 of how you rate your feelings of “Mastery” or “Pleasure” with the task.

The main benefits I’ve found are that I know when my meetings are; I can visualize the time requirements of certain activities on the rest of the schedule (so it’s harder to put a hard task vaguely off until the evening, as it requires a fixed number of blocks); and I can improve motivation of doing challenging tasks (associating the mastery score with enjoyment of completing challenging tasks). The original technique is described in Burns’s book “Feeling Good,” and a summary found via Google search is here (visualization of the table is at the bottom of the article) [0].

I found OneNote better than Excel for implementing this, as the application feels easier to use for quick reference and edits (the table opens up in large font, without needing to Zoom in for Excel as not too many cells are used). I keep copies of past schedules in Excel though, in case I want to analyze it in the future. For capturing tasks, I use Things 3 for to-dos and Google Calendar for events.

I actually did try Plan in SuperMemo software, mentioned by the original post. While I liked the concept, I found it unwieldy to open and edit (as SuperMemo is primarily a flashcard, or more formally spaced repetition, app), and the program is only developed for Windows PCs (though it looks like there is some support for Linux).

[0] https://sourcesofinsight.com/how-to-use-a-daily-activity-sch...

1 comments

Logged in to say this is an excellent mind blowing book if you are feeling bad or dealing with depression. The key is to do the “stupid exercises”. Reprogram your mind.