Being a Slave to My Calendar Changed My Life
Managing your time and being able to execute effectively are critical skills for any manager or executive. So many people struggle with this and my clients often ask for advice on organizing their day and getting things done.
I used to struggle with this myself. However, I spent a lot of time studying productivity and efficiency through books and trial and error and one key takeaway from all this is the calendar. The calendar is the centerpiece of your productive day. If you are not constantly feeding and maintaining your calendar then you are missing out on the freedom it provides.
Freedom? How can having a strict calendar that you have to follow every day lead to freedom you ask? The answer is simple. If you are maintaining and controlling what activities occupy your day then you are exercising the freedom to choose what is important to you. Since you are creating the items in your calendar you are the one controlling what you do from day to day rather than someone else.
Here is how this works. Imagine for a moment that you do not actively maintain a calendar. And many of you may not have to imagine this at all. Monday morning comes around and you have four requests for meetings that day. You have nothing on your calendar so you feel like saying no would be hard to justify even though you really don’t need to go to two of them. They are scattered throughout the morning so you don’t get any significant block of time for any focused or deep work. So that new product idea you were researching and writing a proposal for will now have to wait another day. In between meetings your direct hires come to you with problems and questions for which they need your input and before you know it you are already past lunch and you have gotten nothing done that could be considered important to your own success or goals. Your email alerts are going off all morning and you are pulled into multiple discussions which again suck even more of your time in the morning away until you are sitting mid afternoon with a lower energy level because you skipped lunch and you feel like you haven’t accomplished anything.
Your boss comes to you in the afternoon because the meeting where you will be making the big presentation about your new product proposal has been pushed up to tomorrow. You have not had time to work on it this morning but you reassure your boss that it will be ready. You have a hard time focusing because you don’t do your best creative work in the afternoon and you are crashing from the snack you grabbed to keep your stomach from growling like a hungry grizzly. You are still being bombarded with emails that constantly pull your attention away from your work. Now you have to let your spouse know that you will not be home in time to see your daughter’s first dance recital and you are going to miss the family dinner where you get to reconnect after a long day at work.
Now imagine this alternative. The night before you sit down and spend about 15 minutes mapping out your next day. You block off 3 1/2 hours in the morning to complete your product proposal and mark your calendar as busy. As a result, when others are looking to create the meetings that day you show up as busy and they either move forward with the meetings you really didn’t need to be involved in or attempt to schedule the meetings later in the week when you are available. You create 30 minutes after that to review and respond to the morning’s emails and another two hours of open office time to direct your. employees with questions or problems that need your attention after lunch. You actually get a real lunch today since you blocked off an hour specifically to eat lunch and disconnect and recharge briefly. Your boss advises you of the presentation time change and you are completely prepared and confident about making your presentation earlier than expected. You created another block of 30 minutes towards the end of the day to again check emails and respond to anything that requires immediate attention, shut off your computer and you are out of there on time to see your daughter’s dance recital.
Freedom means you chose how to spend your day. With just a little planning you can double and triple your level of productivity and make sure you have time for what you really consider important.
How do you use your calendar? Post a reply with how your calendar helps you stay organized or if you have a different method I would love to hear about it.
Jason Kistler