Managing Your Calendar to Get More Work Done
Modern technology has upended nearly all aspects of our life - how we maintain friendships, how we share, how we travel, how we get information, how we get healthy, and so many others that can be easily rattled off. The question though, is whether we are in the end becoming a more efficient and productive version of ourselves. Is technology helping us accomplish more? The answer may depend on how we use a most basic commodity - our time. Do we treat time like the precious resource it is, perhaps similar to money? There is more than a grain of truth to the adage that time is money. It isn't unlimited and we wish we had more of it. If we are frugal with our time, if we invest it well, we can accomplish a lot of our life goals. If on the other hand, we don't budget our time well and squander it or allow others to waste it, we will be left with little of it.
Managing Your Calendar Do you dread your workday, packed with so many meetings that you have no time to work on a critical project with a looming deadline? Or do you end the work week perplexed at how your
days were busy but you didn't really move the needle forward on so many tasks? If that sounds familiar, your calendar may not be optimized to work efficiently for you. Below are practical steps you can take to make your calendar a part of the solution rather than the problem: 1. Block time for meetings - If your job requires you to have a lot of meetings outside the office, block 2-3 days in your calendar for external meetings and schedule them only in those days. Extend this to internal meetings as well. This will make your work week more efficient and organized and will leave you with time to do your own work in peace. If you want to be even more organized, you can categorize your meetings - team catchup, demo calls, introductory calls etc. and define how long you want to allocate for each meeting type. This will provide a an easily repeatable structure. 2. Schedule travel time - Rarely do people allow for travel time in their calendars, leading to unrealistic jam-packed schedules and even worse, being perpetually late for appointments. Schedule time for travel - not just planes and trains but also local commute, particularly during rush hour. 3. Block time for your work - Create meetings with yourself and label them 'Priority Tasks'. This will give you a block of time to work on your projects. This is especially important in a team context where others have visibility into your calendar and may assume you are free. 4. Good email habits - 34% of Americans report checking their email 'throughout the day' (more than 10 times). This is perhaps because on average, people check their mobile phones 150 times during the day. This can disrupt your rhythm, make you lose focus and hinder productivity. Schedule an hour in the morning to check and respond to emails and another hour later in the day to manage follow-ups. Create a labeling system to categorize your emails into high priority, quick, less important and garbage. Devise a system for managing each of these categories so you know immediately what to do with a given email. Install Gmail Inbox Pause, an extension that pauses your email activity until you hit the button to unpause, allowing you to control the flow of emails. 5. Push back on meetings - Not every person invited to a large meeting is required to attend. When organizing meetings, specify mandatory and optional participants so people can decide whether attendance is worth their time. Encourage other meeting organizers to do the same. 6. Team calendar management - As a team, discuss the best time to have team meetings that are optimized for efficiency. Try and save time wherever possible. Some management teams even incorporate 'no meeting days' in order to maximize productivity.
7. Create recurring appointments - Scheduling recurring appointments for regular tasks can be be a big time-saver and an efficiency boost as well. It can build a habit of tackling tasks that you may otherwise forget or not find time for. 8. Schedule downtime - Carve out time in your calendar for however you like to relax and unwind - be it a trip to the gym, an evening out with friends, or even spending time with your family. This way you can ensure your work does not eat into your personal time. 9. Periodic calendar reviews - Review your calendar at least once a month. Is it helping you meet your goals? Is it filled with low-priority meetings? Make adjustments and reallocate your time accordingly.
Calendar Management Tools Meeting Scheduling - A lot of innovation has happened in the meeting scheduling space. We give here the example of WizCal, an artificial intelligence based tool that schedules meetings in seconds. It works by suggesting smart times and rooms for meetings based on the participants' calendars with minimal inputs. This eliminates back and forth emails/messages to schedule meetings and improves collaboration. WizCal suggests best time to meet by taking into account
meeting context and preferences of participants, which are learnt automatically based on the usage of the calendar
Goals - Google Calendar (on app) can help you set goals and find time in your calendar to stick to those goals. All you have to do is specify the goal (like go to the gym), say how often you want to do it and what time works best. Google will then find time in your calendar to schedule and maintain that goal. Tasks and calendar integration - Many of us use apps like Wunderlist to create and manage our tasks on a daily basis. An integration of these apps into our calendars will be useful as on one hand it provides time slots to complete those tasks and on the other it provides a full picture of your day and what you need to achieve. Wunderlist integrates with Outlook's app to make this possible.
Analytics Dashboard - MyAnalytics from Microsoft is a personal dashboard that summarizes how you spend your day – on emails, in meetings, working alone or even working after-hours. Based on this data, it recommends changes you can make to your calendar to maximize your productivity. Multiple Calendars - Increasingly, professionals are using multiple calendars - an office outlook calendar, a personal Google calendar, a family calendar through an app, a shared team calendar and maybe even a client calendar if you're a consultant. Juggling all these different calendars can be a nightmare for heavy users and can lead to conflicting appointments. There are now providers (such as Sunrise and Canary Calendar) that resolve this issue by integrating different calendars and presenting a single view to the user.
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