You may wonder ‘why should I care about my calendar?’ While it’s really easy to see your calendar as just another tool. It’s important to realise that the more you put into it, the better your result will be. A small amount of time spent organising your calendar can result in large time and productivity gains.
If you wonder what’s the point, here are 5 reasons why you should care about your calendar.
When you have control of your calendar, you’ll find that:
You miss fewer appointments
The simplest reason of all. If your calendar is well organised, you can see when you’re supposed to be somewhere in plenty of time to get there. A well organised calendar will also have time included for meetings to run over and include time to get from one venue to another. However, you won’t have excessive amounts of time that leave you cooling your heels or arriving excessively early. The only way you’ll know exactly how much you need is by paying attention to how long it takes on average, then adjusting your calendar accordingly.
Everything that needs to be done, gets done most days
If you’re paying attention to your calendar, you’ll know what needs to get done at a glance. You’ll also be able to keep track of what you’ve achieved. By knowing what needs to be done, you can start the day in the right frame of mind. And being able to see what you’ve achieved will help motivate you. You’ll also find that paying attention to your calendar will help you become more aware of how much you’re actually doing.
How you spend your time will be better prioritised
Having an organised calendar helps you to see where you need to spend your time each day. It allows you to schedule in time to take care of important tasks. An organised calendar also makes it easier to see when less important tasks can be scheduled in, and when they should be rescheduled for another day. It allows you to see, for example, that you have several meetings in one area of town on a certain day. In which case, you may wish to reschedule other meetings in the same area for that day. So instead of travelling across town on 3 separate occasions over a fortnight, you spend one day having meetings in that area.
It will be easier to spot the tasks that are time sucks
If you notice that you’re putting aside a large amount of time for a certain task, you might decide that it’s easier to outsource that task. Alternatively, you might decide to find a way to scrap the task altogether or find a different way to get the same result. However, you won’t know that it needs to happen if you don’t know where you’re spending your time.
You can see when you’re at your most productive and schedule time accordingly
You might be a night owl but find you’re most productive around lunch time. Or maybe, it’s first thing in the morning that you get the most done. Whenever it is, knowing when your most productive period occurs, and making sure you schedule that time for things that demand your best performance is worthwhile. For example, I take a while to warm up in the morning. So, I try very hard to not schedule anything much in the morning. Most mornings, I do routine tasks, catch up on reading and check my emails. Then around 10am or 11am when my brain kicks in, I start doing the harder things. But from around 2pm to 6pm is when I try to get the most difficult jobs done.
Knowing what works for you is the key. But you probably won’t know for sure until you start paying attention.
While it’s important to care about your calendar, don’t get too caught up by the sparkly new tools. There are a lot of programs to help you organise your time. It’s easy to get caught up in trying to find a shortcut. Or to end up using too many tools in the hope of finding the perfect group of tools for your needs. Instead of using lots of different productivity tools in a search to find one that works. KISS: Keep it simple stupid: The more tools and options you use the harder it will be to get on top of everything.
