Hello and welcome to episode 274 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.

Of all the productivity tools you have, your calendar is the one tool that will bring you the biggest benefits. It does this by only telling you the truth.

While your task manager and notes are likely to be feature rich and new innovative ways to manipulate your tasks and notes are being launched every week, the humble calendar has remained much the same for hundreds of years. Today, we may be using digital calendars, but the layout and functionality of these digital calendars work the same way as a paper-based calendar.

And your calendar is a true leveller. No matter who you are, where you live, your educational background or job title, you still get the same number of hours as everyone else.

Theoretically, each day gives you a blank canvas to choose how you will paint it, and your calendar acts very much like your sketchbook. It’s a place where you can design your day, experiment and plan.

Your calendar can take care of the basics by reminding you of upcoming birthdays and anniversaries. It can also be used to remind you of bill payment dates, concerts you may wish to go to and your kids’ school terms and holidays. But those are the basics. What else can your calendar do for you? Well, that is the topic of this week’s episode.

So, with that, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.

This week’s question comes from Rob. Rob asks, Hi Carl, I’ve heard you talk about the calendar being the most important part of a time management system, but I’ve always struggled to organise my calendar well. Do you have any tips or tricks to help me get more out of my calendar?

Hi Rob, thank you for your question.

Your calendar should be the foundation of your whole time management and productivity system. It is only your calendar, yet, of all the potential tools you may use, it is the only one that shows you how much time you have.

You can fill up a task manager with hundreds of tasks and if you date them for the same day, your task manager will assume that on that day you want to complete hundreds of tasks. It’s not going to warn you that you don’t have enough time or there are important meetings to attend. It just shows you what you tell it to show you. It has no way to inform you that you are being over-ambitious about what you want to get done on any given day.

Your notes is where you store information you may want or need later. It does not have any time management functionality within your system.

The only tool you have that will indicate how much time you have is your calendar. It never lies to you. You get twenty-four hours each day and you get to choose where you spend those hours.

And that’s the power and beauty of the calendar. Because it gives you a blank canvas, you can use it to design your day. Which means, if you delegate responsibility for your calendar management to other people, you are giving away responsibility of your most valuable asset. Time.

So, with that said, how do we take control of our calendar and use it to design our day and week?

When I am working with an individual who has no productivity system in place, the first area I encourage them to work on is their calendar. What we aim to do is to get the basics in first.

Now, I recommend that you first do an exercise and create a new calendar with your calendar app. I like to call this my “Perfect Day” or Perfect Week” calendar. It is here where you can create a week that covers everything you want time for. Try to do this on a larger screen than your phone—your computer or tablet—because you want to be able t clearly see the whole week in one view.

Now, begin with how much sleep you would you like to get? This is not about how much sleep you are currently getting, rather, ho much sleep you want to get. Remember, this is your “perfect week”, so what would be the “perfect” amount of sleep for you.

Why would you start with sleep? Well, ask yourself, how do you feel when you don’t get enough sleep? How effective are you through the day? On day’s when you have not got enough sleep, how productive were you?

If you want to be at your most effective each day, you need the right amount of sleep. That could be six, seven or eight hours. Whatever number of hours you need block your sleep time out on your “perfect week” calendar.

The reason for beginning with your sleep is once you have your sleep schedule in your calendar, you now know how much time you have available for everything else.

Next, what would you like time for in your personal life? Why start with your personal life? Well, this is the area of our lives we often neglect at the expense of our work. Yet, if you want to live an active, balanced life, we need to proactively create that life for ourselves. Nobody else will do it for us.

So, if you want time to go to the gym three time a week, then schedule that on your calendar. This is reminiscent of when I was a teenager and doing track and field. Every Tuesday and Thursday evening was training nights, and I would never let anything get in the way of that. The only way to ensure that happened was to block out those days.

What about your hobbies? How much time would you like to spend on your pastimes and, more importantly, when would you like to do it? Again, schedule out time each week for these activities.

Then there are your family responsibilities. Things like taking your kids to and from school and walking your dog. Our dog, for example, likes an hour’s walk each day. This should be blocked out too.

Only when you have everything you would like time for each week on your calendar on a personal level, do you switch your attention to your work.

For your work calendar, the place to start is with your fixed appointments. I know a lot of companies have weekly team meetings. If these are fixed, get them in your calendar. I would also suggest, if you get a break for lunch, you get that on your calendar too.

What we are looking for is to see where the gaps are once all the fixed work commitments are in your calendar. It is these gaps that will inform you where you have time to do your important, core work—the work you are employed to do.

Let’s imagine one of your core work responsibilities is to produce a sales report for your CEO each week. This report’s deadline is every Friday at 12pm. If your CEO requires the sales figures for Thursday, this leaves you will two options. You will either do it after business hours on a Thursday evening—probably not the best option as you will be preparing the report after you finish work. Or Friday morning.

If you know you need forty-five minutes to collate the data and get it into the correct format, then you would block an hour for this work on a Friday morning. Ideally, you would fix this in your calendar, so there was no risk someone else can come along and “steal” that time away from you.

This exercise is about designing your “perfect” week. A week where you have time for everything you would like to do. It will be unlikely you will be able to immediately start living this perfect week, although some of you may be lucky enough to be able to do that, for most of us, it will become an aspiration.

If when you have finished and you look at the calendar and feel, yes, this is the kind of week that would leave me feeling accomplished and fulfilled, the next step is to begin the process of merging your real calendar with this “perfect week” calendar.

Because you have already set this up as a separate calendar, you can periodically turn it on and off and compare it with your real calendar.

A tip I can share with you here, Rob, is pick one part of your perfect week calendar and focus on bringing your real life into alignment with that. For example, if, on your perfect week, you have your going to bed time at 11pm and wake up time at 6:30am, yet at the moment, you are going to bed after midnight and struggling to get out of bed at 7:00am, this would be a good place to start.

In my experience, readjusting your sleep schedule takes around two weeks. So, you can begin by committing to going to bed at 11pm every night for the next fourteen days.

I have also found you can build a work item into your real week as well. If you have a block of time on your perfect week calendar for focused work each Tuesday and Wednesday morning, try aligning that with your real week. Again, make sure you block it out on your calendar and see how you go.

Much of this will be a trial and error. However, if you work at it, over time you will find you are beginning to adjust things in your life so you have the time do the things you want to do.

A lot of the stress associated with work comes from a feeling we don’t have enough time to do all the things other people are demanding of us. It’s not just our work commitments, but commitments to our family, friends and partners. It can also be voluntary commitments we have made in the past that perhaps are not bringing us the sense of accomplishment we thought they would.

It maybe you will need to make some difficult decisions and have awkward conversations about the demands others are making on your time. While these will be uncomfortable in the moment, the sense of release you will get when you do it will be huge and the benefits to you, your mental wellbeing and ultimately your accomplishments in life will make those brief moments of discomfort worth it.

To finish, here are some quick fire tips to help you with your calendar management.

Try at all possible to have one master calendar where both your personal and work commitments can be seen together. If you work in a company that restricts access to your work calendar, you can copy your appointments over, although you won’t need to copy over your focus time blocks.

When planning your week, begin with your calendar. That will show you how committed you are before you start deciding what tasks you will do. This way, you will be able to better see where you can add more or less tasks. If you have a day of meetings, you can reduce the number of tasks you do, when you have days with fewer meetings you decide to add more tasks.

Don’t allow yourself feel wedded to your calendar commitments. If you feel tired, sick or just want to have an easy day, move your commitments around if you can. Your calendar is there to serve you, not the other way round. The only thing I would advise against is ignoring your calendar completely. Your calendar is there to guide you, but if you start to ignore it, its usefulness will disappear.

So there you go, Rob. I hope that has helped and given you some motivation to begin using your calendar.

Thank you for your question and thank you for listening. It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.

How to use a digital calendarHow to use a calendarHow to productively use a calendar

Carl Pullein

How To Get The Most Out Of Your Calendar.

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