Boosting Productivity — Your Calendar is Your Superpower…
Introduction
Introduction
I like productivity. I'm a big fan of it. And I like Google Calendar. Together they are very, very strong. It's so easy to organise your life so that you can get more done in less time and make time for things you enjoy but we have to manage our calendar first. Why?
Why is a calendar a great superpower?
You may hear friends, family or anyone say, let me check my calendar. Its become quite a common phrase in Gen Z, era. Many people "own" a calendar, but not that many people use it regularly out of habit or just not wanting to be productive. (Indirectly Procrastinate). So it's a superpower; it just needs the right person to use it. YOU!
Google Calendar is simple, easy and free, so it comes in pretty handy. Your calendar is a great superpower and this is because it will give you all the time you need for whatever you want and it’s easy to make sure it stays that way.
How to Organise your Calendar.
There are steps to organising your calendar. These include repetitive tasks Setting deadlines and organising events.
The ordinary, repetitive Tasks
The first step in setting up your Calendar is finding out what repetitive things you do; this can include clubs, extracurriculars daily/weekly tasks. For example, every week you go to get groceries and it usually is on a Thursday. Then you create a Block in your Calendar for as much time as you need to get all the groceries for that week. You may need to go on another day as well in case of emergencies, but that shouldn’t make a difference to your main schedule.
You need to create a block in your Calendar for all these repetitive things. Give all these “task blocks” one colour and name them Tasks. However, be careful to not label clubs and extracurriculars the same. Instead, keep them as another colour for convenience.
Setting deadlines
Whenever you have something that you want to get done. Whether that be for School, Life or just something that you want to do, but you won't do often then you need to set deadlines. This is done quite easily with Google Calendar as all you have got to do have a starting date and an ending date, but you should make that as short as you possibly think you can.
If you want to get an assignment done, you would have a mental deadline. However, we naturally overestimate the time we NEED to meet this deadline. Parkinson's law states that “work expands to fill the time allotted for its completion” This means that if you set a deadline for one week you would complete everything possible in the world till the day before and then panic and work to meet the deadline. I make sure that I don't fall victim to this by giving myself a maximum of two days after the starting date to complete anything, whether that be an assignment, a project, or even a blog post.
Organising events
The final step in organising your calendar is organising events. This means making and creating blocks of time for your hobbies and interests that you want to complete but usually can't find the time to do so. The reason most people can't complete these events is because of either procrastinating the event or not prioritising it. This exemplifies Parkinson’s law once again because when we have the idea to “catch up on revision notes, or clean our room” we usually don't until it becomes mandatory.
The task is inevitable, but we choose to delay it. So when we organise events, we allocate time to complete the event and once we use this time we set another event to this again until we complete the major task.
Conclusion
To conclude, a calendar is a great superpower because it allows us to complete and perform tasks that we usually don't have time to do. This is only possible by organising it. The organisation is key and why most people get ahead in life and why others are more productive.
