Using Your Calendar for Effective Time Management

How do you use your calendar? Is it just a place for your appointments or a powerful way to manage your daily activities?

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Episode 297 | Script

Hello, and welcome to episode 297 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show.

For centuries, the great and the good (and not so good) have all used a simple time management system. It’s a system that has largely been unaffected by digital technology and one that has enabled such great things as Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel ceiling painting, Charles Darwin’s Origins of Species, and the Apollo Space program’s moon landing. Without this method and tool, none of these amazing iconic events would have happened. 

What system am I talking about? The calendar. Or rather your diary. 

I was reminded of this recently while helping a high school student prepare for a particularly intensive period of exams and assignments. We began talking about where he was keeping his course notes and how he was managing his time. We considered using a task manager, which he rejected as being just another thing to manage (good point, I thought), and it was when we began talking about using his calendar that I could see instantly that here was the key to helping him through this busy time. 

So, just how can a calendar help you with your time management and productivity, and what should you be putting on there? Well, that’s for this week’s question to ask. So, without further ado, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question. 

This week’s question comes from Alan. Alan asks; hi Carl, I’ve heard you talk a lot about your calendar and was wondering if you have any advice on using it better. At the moment, I only use my calendar for my meetings and public holidays. 

Hi Alan, Thank you for your question. 

I consider myself very lucky today because my introduction to the world of time management systems was a simple A4 desk diary. When opened, that diary showed my full week, and I had space at the bottom of each day for my tasks. 

At a glance, I could instantly see how busy I was on a given day, and it was that diary and then a Franklin Planner, from around 1993, that managed my life until 2009, when I went all in digitally. 

This meant that my core beliefs about how I managed my time and did my work were centred around my calendar and what I had time for. 

Now, the way I use my calendar is for three critical things. 

The first, unsurprisingly, is for my appointments. All my appointments, whether manually added by myself or ones that come from my coaching programme’s scheduling service, are automatically added to my calendar. 

Now, a quick word about my scheduling service. I have complete control over what is scheduled here. I set the times I am available, and only people who have the link can schedule appointments. This has been a big time saver for me because most of my clients are based in the US or Europe. That means there is a significant time difference between where I am and where they are. 

Instead of going back and forth negotiating a suitable time, my clients can pick and choose based on what’s convenient for them without having to waste time sending countless emails. Once they have selected a time, I get a notification, and the time is blocked out in my calendar. 

However, the advantage of using a scheduling service is you give yourself greater control over your day. For example, if you want to protect your mornings for focused work, you can set your available times for between 1 pm and 4 pm each day. Doing that would mean over a five-day period, you would be available for fifteen hours. For most of you, I am sure that would be enough time for all your meetings and appointments. 

The great thing about scheduling services is your boss, clients, and colleagues enjoy the flexibility and not only do you save time for yourself, but you also save time for everyone else. All they need do is go to your scheduling service, select a time that suits them, and the appointment will then be pushed to your calendar. Job done with no input from you at all. 

The two services I know are Acuity, the one I use because it’s built into my website and Calendly. I believe Calendly has a free option if you want to test it out first. 

The second item that goes onto my calendar is date-specific events. These are things like bills to pay, public holidays or if my wife is going to be away. 

Now, a lot of my bill payments are set up as automatic payments, but I still add the payment date to my calendar because I want to make sure there are sufficient funds in my account to cover the payment. 

If you are viewing your calendar as a week to view rather than a month or day to view, when you do your weekly plan, you will instantly see anything that is date-specific that you need to be aware of and can plan accordingly. 

Another type of date-specific event you can put here is your project deadlines or if you need to call someone on a given day, and they can be called at any time. (If you need to call them at a specific time, you add the call to that time slot on the appropriate day.) 

Another type of date-specific information you can put here would be travel notices. For example, if your town or city or a city you will be visiting that day has a major road closure, you need to be aware of. For example, a couple of weeks ago, the town we live in had the main coastal road closed for five hours while they ran the annual marathon. While I do not often use that road, it is something useful to know in case we decided to go out for lunch or do an errand. 

Rail strikes in the UK are usually pre-notified. If you use the rail service and you know there will be a strike coming up, you can add that to your calendar. 

All these date-specific events and information should be placed at the top of your calendar as all-day events. That way, they don’t interfere with your timed schedule but act as notices you need to know about. 

And finally, your time blocks for focused work. If you have followed this podcast for a while, you will have heard me talking about core work—the work you are employed to do. To get this work done on time every time, you need to make sure you have enough time blocked out for doing it. If, for example, you block your mornings for doing focused work, that would give you a further fifteen hours a week for undisturbed, focused work. Imagine that. Knowing, confidently, you have fifteen hours each week to get on—undisturbed—with work that must be done each week. How productive would you be in that situation? 

I don’t block every morning for focused work, though. Mondays, Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Fridays are blocked. I keep Thursdays open for calls (my clients on the West Coast of North America are currently sixteen hours behind me). I work Saturdays as well, and I keep Saturdays open, so I have the flexibility to catch up with anything I have not had time to do or am a little behind. 

Now, if you pause a moment and look at what you could have here. Imagine you work a regular forty-hour week. You have fifteen hours available for meetings and collaboration and fifteen hours for focused work, which leaves you with ten hours for flexible work—the unexpected and urgent. Would that be enough for you? 

Now, none of this should ever be set in concrete. There needs to be some flexibility. If you consistently do a daily planning session, then you can move things around to better suit the week you are in and what needs to be done that week. 

For example, once a month, I will have one or two days blocked out completely for project days. This gives me the time I need to dedicate a full day to a bigger project. 

There is one more item I would suggest you block out. That is an hour a day for dealing with your communications. Let’s be honest; we all get too many emails and messages that need to be dealt with. If you do not set aside time for dealing with them, when will you do it? You cannot ignore most of these messages and emails (although I am sure you wish you could do so sometimes). 

If you know you have an hour dedicated to responding to your email each day, you will find you are less reactive about it and much more proactive. You don’t panic when a message or email comes in because you know you have an hour set aside later in the day to focus on your responses. 

There are a lot of ways to get the most out of your calendar, and I would strongly advise you to find ways you can use it to bring a sense of calm and focus to your day. There are little things you can do. For example, I only allow people to schedule either thirty or fifty-minute appointments. That then gives me time to prepare for the next call if I have back-to-back meetings. 

You are now likely wondering about where the task manager fits into this system. Well, like the calendar, the to-do list has been around for a long time. However, the to-do list was and should still be considered a subsidiary of the calendar. If something must be done on a given day, it goes into the calendar; if it can be done at any time, it goes into your task manager. 

With the Time Sector System, you group your tasks by when you would like to get them done. You can date these tasks for specific days, and if you see you have several calls or follow-ups to do, you can block out an hour or so for follow-ups or communications to take care of these. Your time sectors are holding pens that help you to structure your day. You structure your day in your calendar, and your task manager acts as a feeder for all the little things you need to do in the time you have available. 

For example, in my task manager today, I have three writing tasks, which I have done in the three hours I set aside for writing today. I also have a number of admin tasks to complete, which I will do in the admin hour I have scheduled later today. My calendar tells me what I should type of work I should be doing, and my task manager takes care of the tasks I should perform at that time. 

When you use your calendar as your primary productivity tool and your task manager as the feeder, you quickly see what you have time for each day and can then reschedule or renegotiate commitments to ensure you are not overstretching yourself. 

So there you go, Alan. I hope that has helped, and thank you for your question. 

Thank you to you, too, for listening, and it just remains for me now to wish you a very, very productive week.