PRODUCTIVITY

My Calendar is my Secret Weapon

How I manage my diary to ensure I am both a leader and a professional

Photo by Eric Rothermel on Unsplash

Why I need to structure my time

I have a lot of people in my teams (200+) and constantly struggle with my diary. In a typical working week, I need to deal with:

1. Supervision
2. My boss
3. Problem-solving (my favourite)
4. Skip-level meetings with the direct reports of my managers
5. General networking to build a picture of what’s happening in the company
6. Escalations from stakeholders
7. My projects
8. Management control of my teams
9. Compliance
10. Me and my needs
11. My day job

I also have teams to the East of me and to the West, which brings timezone challenges, too.

Over the last year, I’ve experimented with Microsoft’s ‘focus time’ feature, but it’s fickle and doesn’t give me blocks of time to work with. I’ve also experimented with shorter timeslots. Turning a 30-minute meeting into a 25-minute meeting makes little difference, but turning an hour-long meeting into 45 minutes is…