Calendar Management Part 1: No Extra White Space or Dumb Meetings
We spend too much time in meetings. Ones that we should not even need to have. Yet it is just as horrible to have large swaths of white space in your calendar. Own your calendar.
How many times have you sat in a meeting thinking “What the heck am I doing in this meeting?” You had accepted an invitation to a meeting that you have little understanding and can only explain to yourself that you accepted because it showed up in your inbox. FOMO?
Or have you come into work, looked at your empty calendar and thought, “Perfect! Now I can get something done today!” You get home scratching your head, “What the heck did I do today?!?” Your lack of planning was not an effective use of your day and you were easily distracted.
Every time you try to take your vacation or holiday, you spend an exceeding amount of time working ahead of the date to get ahead. When you return you then play catchup. The holiday hours you are taking are consumed by the overtime before and after. Are you sure you have worked on the most important things?
It has been suggested that the more meetings that an organization has, the less structure it has. There is a narrow job focus and many of the staff and managers have not been given enough responsibility to the tasks needing accomplishing.
We have very few clock ticks in a day and burning through them on unnecessary meetings or wasting time by switching tasks with no direction and unfinished actions is needless. Additionally, with time as our most valuable resource and not a commodity, we need to guard that treasure with the same fervor as a pile of gold. Why would you willingly give your time away without justification? We need to learn to be more effective.
How?
Start by tracking your time as simply as possible. If you have an assistant it can help, but many of us do not. It is necessary to learn to be diligent about tracking your time. You need to track your time throughout every day for a whole quarter — 13-weeks. This period will help give you a clear understanding of where you are spending your time. Measuring will allow you to change your behavior. Some options to consider.
- Use a computer or phone app tracking tools such as RescueTime and Gyroscope but expect to give up your personal data to a 3rd party when you go this route. Not everyone is comfortable giving up that personal visibility. You can also look for other time tracking tools found using a simple web search. Look up lifehack.org for a curated list for you to select the best option:
2. You can use a spreadsheet to develop a tracking tool to identify the tasks where you are spending your time. Use a SmartSheets plugin or Excel time tracking sheets. It is only as good as your own discipline and information accuracy to enter the information to track. Consider the following categories to track:
Start by tracking binary — ON/OFF. A tick for each time you worked on those efforts. As you get in the habit of tracking in the binary sense, you eventually build the behavior to track the time. You only need to be accurate to the ¼ hour or the ½ hour. You can track it by use of time started by time finished. Print a sheet each day to track and manually track it, or track it via your notepad you carry throughout the day.
3. Use your calendar day as a printed worksheet. Throughout the day, fill in the blocks or color in the space that you are doing at that period. That time may be contrary to the time that you have originally identified. Use this time to fill in the details in your spreadsheet to better identify your efforts throughout the day.
Eventually, you will become more efficient in using the Outlook calendar tracking tool (or your preferred software option) available to you. Block your time in the segments that make the best use of your efforts and knowledge. Become more conscious about allowing the standard 1-hour meeting to be the default. Consider making your meetings compressed. Constraints can be used to your advantage.
Calendar management will become clearer as you begin tracking your time. Soon you will understand the time you spent with the teams and peers throughout the week. This can provide you with greater guidance as to how to plan your future weeks.
A Harvard Business Review of CEO’s time indicates the need to have a structured day. HBR created three separate stories relating to the time that CEOs take throughout the day. More particularly the story “One CEO’s Approach to Managing His Calendar” is a map to consider where time is spent. Balancing the time between meetings, travel, and family becomes the obvious consideration.
One caveat. Do not feel the need to schedule your entire day to the minute! This can be counterproductive because you then become a slave to the calendar. Additionally, the plans you make for the day to the minute will become blown quickly. Yet be sure there is no excess white space to allow the attention to waver.
Consider the rule of threes. Leave at about ⅓ of the day (about 3-hours) unscheduled allowing the opportunity to manage the crisis moments as they occur. This flexibility will allow those additional unscheduled opportunities come to fruition.
There is a need for proactive time management. Measuring your results will help identify the wasteful time throughout your day. Examine the time that is being asked of you to join a meeting — is this the best use of your time? Is it the most important thing? Look at those opportunities to ensure the teams that are having the meetings have the right responsibilities and the correct instructions. Be sure the clarity of the work needed is identified early and often, with the association of who does what by when.
Go forth and be brilliant.
