I've been thinking about my time scheduling app again. What makes this app different is that it's based on how radio stations schedule commercials.

There are commercials in radio stations that must run at a specific time. For example, if a client is sponsoring the 4:15 traffic report, then their ad needs to run then.

In our lives, this is like set calendar events. If you have a daily stand-up meeting with your team at 9, then that's a commitment to that time and you won't schedule other items then.

Once those fixed commitments are set, you can look to fit in the things you need to do that don't need to be done at a specific time and roughing out your day.

For example, I need to write the essay for my newsletter, I just want to do it sometime Tuesday morning and I work it in around my set meetings.

I do need to make sure that high priority tasks without a fixed time don't get shut out because I have too many set meetings.

I look at this each week and make adjustments. I'm playing with another radio idea - avails. I only have so much time available for set meetings each day so that I have enough flexible time to accomplish what I need to accomplish.

Another radio concept is adjacency. When I worked in radio we never ran two car ads in the same break. Now cars are classified more specifically so you might hear a car ad and a pickup truck ad in the same break.

Our salespeople contrasted that with newspapers which used to run all of the tire ads on the same page.

For my daily life scheduling I prefer the newspaper model. There's a significant cost to context switching so if I have five emails to write, I'd rather do one after another. If I'm out to pick up groceries, I'll try to schedule returning my library books on the way there or back.

Finally, some parts of my day are better for some sorts of tasks.

Look at your day - say a typical weekday - from the time you wake up to the time you go to bed.

Divide your day into various parts.

Again, here I'm looking at taking a page from radio and using the standard radio DayParts (parts of a day - get it?).

In radio, Morning Drive is usually 6-10 (or thereabouts). It takes you from waking up through heading in to work to getting your day started.

Middays (10 - 2 or 3 ish) are the meat of your day. There when you get your most productive work done and where collaboration is most possible.

Afternoon drive (2 or 3 - 6 or 7 ish) is the time where you wrap up your day and go home or out to dinner.

Evenings (6 or 7 to midnight) is the time up until you go to bed. It may include going out for the evening, sitting in front of the tv, hanging with family, or working on a pet project.

Overnights is often a light commercial load in radio. Usually it's the PI (per inquiry) ads where the station only gets paid by the number of people who mention the station they heard it on. You don't schedule this time. At my age, my PI is usually having to get up to go to the bathroom at night. That's not something that goes in my planner.

Commercials can be scheduled for a particular daypart or they can be ROS (Run of Schedule). These are the ones we don't care when they run, they just need to be done some time.

My goal is for the user not to have to think of the actual concepts from radio but but these ideas will contribute to the design of the app I hope I won't actually build.

In talking to people a lot of them have a natural flow to their day were meetings cluster at one or more times and focused work is done at another. Your dayparts may not match mine - but it is one in a suite of techniques that I'm trying to enable.

These are some initial thoughts.