7 Sunday Steps to Manage Your Calendar & Be More Productive

Once you’re in the office on Monday morning, trying to be proactive vs reactive is easier said than done…

You can’t just let stuff happen to you, you need a plan to make it happen. My recommendation is to take some time each Sunday in order to reflect and plan for the week ahead.

See point 4 — this is a screenshot of my weekly calendar view…

I can’t overstate the importance of being productive and keeping focused, here’s the 7 calendar planning tasks I recommend doing each Sunday in order to make sure you get your week off to a flying start:

1. Retrospectively review your previous week — this is a tip from a dinner I went to with James Caan last year and it’s incredibly important. You don’t always know in advance which meetings are going to produce value, but you can review in hindsight. Was last week as good as you’d hoped for? Spend some time going back, so that you can learn from the trends going forward and find future tasks you can drop or delegate…
2. Make a list of the top 25 things you want to achieve that week, then take Warren Buffet’s advice; circle the top 5 and forget the other 20 ever existed. This advice is for bigger picture thinking, but it can also apply to weekly planning, as it gives you one small win for each working day of the week, remember less is more…
3. Plan your week ahead & be prepared to re-schedule — doing this on a Sunday gives you a chance to prepare for what is coming, and move anything around if you need to. I’m the type of person who once I’ve said I’ll do something, I don’t want to disappoint — but sometimes you need to put yourself first and push things back, in order to focus on what’s most important.
4. Colour code your calendar (see above) — I do this to differentiate between external meetings (red), internal tasks(yellow), phone calls (green) and personal events (blue) — plus you may have noticed I have a plugin for all Liverpool football fixtures (purple)! This helps a lot to ensure I’m in the right mindset and means that I can make sure I schedule time to manage my energy levels better. I try to avoid weeks when I’m doing something on more than 3 evenings, or have too many meetings — as I know that will just tire me out.
5. Add in some scheduled time to breathe! It’s easy to let your diary get out of control. It’s important for me to block out time when I can work on the business, instead of in the business — and that means focusing on the important, non-urgent tasks — where the only way to find time for this, is by making time for it.
6. Have a morning routine — everything is a little slower and more relaxed when you can wake up before anyone else has got started. Make the most of it! The key is to pick something that you can commit to, so don’t start too early and try to do too much. Small gradual improvements are much more likely to be long-lasting.
7. Schedule time to exercise — you can’t be flat out 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, you need to schedule in time for yourself. Exercise is important in order to stay fresh — I start each week with a Monday morning gym session and try to schedule time for myself so that it’s not 100% work during the week.

Hopefully these tips can help to get more from your week ahead, they’ve definitely helped me. What are your top ways to plan for the week ahead?

About The Author

Kevin Gibbons is Managing Director of BlueGlass. You can connect with him on Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook.