🗓️ How I use my calendar

Most people prioritise what is on their to-do list. Those people are wrong.

Your calendar is more important than your to do list. A calendar speaks more truth than a to-do list. I focus on getting my calendar right.

As Shreyas Doshi said on his excellent thread about advanced time management principles, “Your to-do list is the ideal Sunday evening theory. Your calendar is the brutal Monday to Friday practice.”

One of my clients totally overhauled his life for the better by applying this one principle after he started working with me.

Since we started working together and switched him to prioritising his calendar he has trained for and competed in an Ironman Triathlon while running his business, improved his relationship with his spouse, restructured his team, taken a month off for a holiday (without his business crashing), and significantly improved his revenue. This one change makes a big impact.

For me, not only has it significantly altered the way I approach life but it has also brought huge efficiency gains, revenue gains, and happiness gains. It is the reason why I get to go abroad on a last minute holiday with friends later today.

The principle is simple: schedule your tasks on your calendar.

Don’t write them on a list, don’t hope you will get things done, don’t guess what you should do each time you sit down to work.

I have written about this principle multiple times in different forms, such as calendar priority alignment, my favourite year end exercise, and quotes on scheduling.

There are three things that will really help you to make the switch from your current system to a scheduled calendar system.

1. You need to actually believe it is worthwhile and commit to it for a set time

   
   

2. You need to build flexibility into the system

   
   

   1. At first you won’t know your true schedule. Chaos exists in life, but it is often more predictable than you think. Over time, you start to spot patterns such as often getting distracted by x things or at x time of the day or x day in the week. When you start with scheduling, you need to build flexibility into your schedule to account for this unknown chaos. For example, if a task should take an hour, schedule for two hours. If shit happens you still hit the goal because you had the needed slack in the schedule, if it doesn’t then you still feel great because you achieved your goal an hour early.

      
      

   2. When I start with clients we keep assigned blocks relatively vague, rather than the scheduled block being “complete x task” or “go to the gym”, it will be something more like “1 hour of focused work”, or “exercise for 45 minutes”. This allows flexibility within the scheduled block to allow for unknown or uncontrollable variables.

      
      

3. You need to schedule things “backwards”

   
   

   1. Schedule your priority tasks first. Often, this means non-work tasks go into your calendar first. Your priorities are probably your health and/or your family, so you should first schedule things like the gym, social activities, family time, etc. This helps ensure you do the things that really matter to you, while also making you conscious of how much time you have and what you have to look forward to. What are we working for anyway?

      
      

Give it a go this week. Schedule your tasks for specific times that you will complete them. Then, tell me how you get on with it.

Calendar priority alignment

💡 Quote I'm pondering

"Show me your calendar and I will tell you your priorities." - Kevin Kelly, founding executive editor of Wired magazine

What we believe and what is reality is often different. I see this all the time with entrepreneurs who tell me their priorities are one thing, but their time and energy are spent entirely elsewhere.

How I solve this for myself? Firstly, I have someone who keeps me on track and questions why I do the tasks I do. Is that task truly necessary? How does it bring me closer to my goal? Secondly, I “predict” what I believe are my priorities and I review whether the evidence shows that to actually be the case.

External eyes help me to see what I am otherwise blind to, such as things I am too close to.

With my weekly prediction and review I can see through the mirage of my own reality by reviewing hard evidence. Do your actions match your words?

I shared this in my Work Smart Wednesday newsletter. Want the full set of related insights? You can read them here: https://worksmartwednesday.substack.com/p/work-smart-wednesday-june-5-2024

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