Scheduling your work is something that seems so obvious to me now that I am surprised that every productivity application does not do this. The concept is so simple that it is often overlooked. This feature is crucial in helping me manage the chaos in my entire life.
Most people already use a calendar to schedule all their appointments. Some even go so far as to schedule blocks of time for getting their own work done. However, I have yet to meet anyone (other than other OnePlace users of course) who actually plans "when" they are going to do each task on their list. There are countless side effects of not scheduling your work. Here are just a few:

1. Endless time spent "managing" your task list
2. Squeaky* tasks get done first
3. You have a tendency to do tasks in LIFO (last in first out) order
4. You never know what you "should" do today
5. Coordinating work on a project is almost impossible

*Squeaky tasks are those tasks that keep popping up on your radar for one reason or another, possibly because someone asks endlessly if it is complete.

If you are like most people, you have a large pile of tasks to complete "sometime". Some of those tasks in the pile have deadlines, some don't. We view a deadline as a date the task HAS to be completed by. Or in other words, a commitment. If you tell a customer that you will have that proposal to them by Friday, you have made a commitment for Friday. However, if the proposal is going to take some time to complete, you really don't want to start on Friday do you? So, you would schedule the proposal task for earlier in the week.

In OnePlace, we made a distinction between when a task is SCHEDULED to be worked on and when the DEADLINE is for it to be complete. This has turned out to be a huge differentiation for us.

I have been scheduling my work for a year now and although I have no formal data to back this up, I am more productive now than at any point in my career. I also am getting deeper into my 'pile' of tasks than ever before. I am getting work done that I have been postponing indefinitely. I am no longer feeling the effects of the list above.

Another side benefit to scheduling your work is that you no longer will have to answer the question "What are you doing?". This has an implicit effect of improving your team collaboration. Others can look at what you have scheduled for any given day. They can only see tasks that they have access to. This would be the tasks that are in a workplace that you are both a member of. So, they will never be able to see your private tasks.

Here are some tips on how to get the most out of the scheduling capability within OnePlace.

1. Only work on tasks that are on your schedule!
   
   This is very important. It is okay to add to your schedule throughout the day. However, in order to get the value out of scheduling your work, you need to be committed to working on your tasks that you planned on doing. In OnePlace there is a view dedicated to scheduled tasks.
2. Schedule tasks as you add them or as they are assigned to you (Set it and forget it)
   
   I no longer forget to do things. Here is how I do it. If I know the exact date that I want to work on something then I schedule it. If I don't know, then I attempt to figure out the week I want to do it. I then schedule it for Monday of that week. On Sunday night or Monday morning of each week, I work over my schedule for the week, moving tasks around until my week is "full". Full might be 40 hours worth of work or 10 hours, depending on the week. If I don't know the week then I put in on the first Monday of the month I plan on doing the task.
3. Schedule the tasks for all facets of your life and use contexts to filter them
   
   This may seem obvious but I am surprised at how many people do not think about this. I fully believe that you can only achieve maximum productivity and balance if you apply the same approach to your personal (and other facets) life as you do at work. Given this, OnePlace was designed from the ground up to work for all facets of your life. See the post on privacy for more details on this. I set a context on each and every task. This allows me to tell OnePlace what "context" I am in, and it will only show me the appropriate tasks. So, when I am home I can focus in on those tasks that I want to do there. Here is a good explanation of what a context is and some advice on picking them. In OnePlace, contexts are personal and therefore need to be configured by the user. They can be found in your OnePlace settings. If you are not sure which contexts to add, you can tell OnePlace to create a starter set for you in the context view.
4. Only schedule a reasonable amount of work for any given day
   
   I have found from personal experience that if my day starts out with an unreasonable number of scheduled tasks then I do not take the list seriously. There must be something deep in my brain that knows that there is no way to get all that work done, so just ignore it. There are two ways that you can get a schedule with too much work. The first is to schedule it that way. Don't do it. The second is more subtle. When you look at your tasks that are scheduled for today, you will see everything that was scheduled for today AND anything that was scheduled for a past day that hasn't been completed. So, if you do not get your work done it automatically rolls forward. If you consistently over-schedule yourself, you will start building up too much work. You should start your day by looking at your schedule and working it over until you feel committed to doing what is scheduled.
5. Estimate the effort for your work
   
   In order to really do justice on #4 you need to know how much effort each task is going to take. Make it a practice to turn on time tracking for your tasks, and then estimate them at the point when you add them. You will find scheduling much easier if you know this. We even estimate tasks that we add that may be worked on by a teammate. This aids in planning in general. Purists would argue you have no idea how long it will take someone else to do a task. That may be true, but the value in having a ballpark estimate for a task outweighs the downside of being wrong on the estimate. Plus, we have found that we are not as wrong as we thought we would be.
6. Stick with it.
   
   It will take awhile to get used to having your work scheduled. It also will take a few weeks for all your work to make it into OnePlace. Like any new habit, you need to force yourself to do it for awhile. Then, before you know it, you will not be able to imagine not scheduling your work. I would be lost without my OnePlace schedule. I am finding it infinitely more valuable to have my work scheduled than I ever did having my appointments scheduled.

I hope these tips help you get the most out of scheduling your work. I am confident that once you start scheduling your work you will find you are getting more done and staying focused. That has been the case for me.