As a busy professional managing my time effectively is critical. There are only so many hours in a day and it’s easy to lose track of important deadlines or let unplanned interruptions derail my schedule. That’s why using a calendar is an essential time management tool for me.
In this comprehensive guide, I’ll explain why a calendar is so valuable for time management and share my proven strategies for getting the most out of your calendar. Whether it’s a physical planner or digital calendar, these tips will help you become more organized, productive, and less stressed!
Benefits of Using a Calendar for Time Management
Before diving into calendar strategies. let’s review why it’s such an indispensable time management tool
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Visualize your time – A calendar provides an invaluable visual overview of your days and weeks so you can see where your time goes.
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Plan ahead – You can block out time for priorities, goals, and projects in advance. This proactive planning prevents procrastination down the line.
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Schedule focused time – Calendars allow scheduling uninterrupted chunks of time for big tasks without distractions.
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Manage workload – Reviewing your calendar makes it easy to assess upcoming workload and adjust to prevent burnout
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Hit deadlines – Never miss another deadline when you plug them into your calendar with reminders.
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Minimize conflicts – Easily spot overlapping events and commitments before they happen.
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Track habits – Use a calendar to build routines and habits by scheduling them repeatedly.
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Improve punctuality – Get a realistic sense of time and stay on schedule with calendar event alerts.
Using your calendar effectively is guaranteed to help you feel more organized and in control of your time. Now let’s get into the calendar best practices and techniques that make it happen!
Step 1: Choosing the Right Calendar
The first step is selecting the right calendar system for your needs. Here are the main options:
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Paper planner – A classic paper calendar or planner offers portability and keeps you off devices. Great for visual thinkers.
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Desktop calendar – Desktop calendar apps like Google Calendar and Outlook provide expanded features compared to paper.
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Mobile calendar – Mobile calendar apps allow accessing your schedule anywhere and get notifications on the go.
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Wall calendar – Large wall calendars provide an at-a-glance overview for families and offices.
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Whiteboard calendar – Erasable whiteboard calendars are ideal for teams and frequent schedule changes.
Consider how you prefer to plan and access your calendar when choosing. I use both a paper planner and Google Calendar synced across my devices. Find the right setup for your style.
Step 2: Creating a Consistent Daily Routine
The key to calendar time management is developing consistent daily routines and habits. Here’s how to set up a solid daily schedule:
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Wake up/morning routine – Plot a consistent wake-up time and morning routine to start your day right.
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Commute – Mark out your daily commute times so you leave on time.
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Lunch break – Add a daily lunch break as a recurring event so you actually take a pause.
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Exercise – Schedule exercise at the same time each day to turn it into a habit.
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Wind down – Block out transition time in the evenings for personal wind down before bed.
Planning consistent daily routines like these on your calendar reinforces good time management habits. You’ll be amazed how much more focused and productive following a steady schedule makes you.
Step 3: Scheduling Priorities, Goals, and Projects
Now comes the fun part – scheduling time for your biggest priorities, goals, and projects on your calendar. Here are some tips:
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Block focus time – Carve out chunks of at least 1-2 hours for deep work on priorities each day. Protect this time!
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Assign weekly goals – Give yourself specific tasks and metrics to accomplish that week for important goals.
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Schedule project milestones – Backward plan projects by blocking time for milestones and work back from deadlines.
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Limit meetings – Restrict meetings to certain days or times to preserve focus blocks for real work.
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Batch similar tasks – Schedule blocks of time for related tasks to maximize focus (i.e. creative tasks together, admin tasks together).
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Use weekend time – Take advantage of freer weekend schedules to make progress on big projects and goals.
When you schedule the important stuff first, you ensure you’re spending time on what matters rather than getting caught in the weeds.
Step 4: Managing Deadlines and Appointments
Of course, your calendar also needs to capture all your deadlines, appointments, and events to avoid slipping through the cracks. Be diligent about this:
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Plug in deadlines – As soon as you get a deadline, add it to your calendar with alerts leading up to it.
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Schedule appointments – Calendar all appointments as soon as they are made so you reserve that time.
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Add meetings – When invited to meetings, immediately accept and add them to your calendar.
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Set reminders – Use calendar reminders religiously for all events so nothing takes you by surprise.
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Check frequently – Scan your calendar daily and throughout the day to stay up-to-date.
Making a habit of fully updating your calendar will help you stay on top of all your personal and professional commitments. Don’t let anything fall between the cracks.
Step 5: Review and Adjust Regularly
The final piece is continually reviewing and adjusting your calendar as needed:
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Assess weekly – Take time each week to review the previous week and optimize your calendar for the next.
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Check daily – Make quick daily calendar reviews part of your morning or evening routine.
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Realign priorities – If priorities change, adjust your calendar to assign time to new priorities.
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Learn from patterns – Analyze calendar patterns to find time-wasting habits or peak productivity times.
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Delegate when overloaded – If your calendar is overbooked, delegate tasks or responsibilities to someone else.
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Improve routines – Use reviews to pinpoint better daily and weekly routines that work for you.
Sticking to a solid calendar system requires constantly tweaking and improving it. But it’s worth it for the time management superpowers your calendar gives you!
Get Started Optimizing Your Calendar Today
Whew – that was a lot of calendar time management tips! Don’t feel you need to implement them all at once. Try adding one new technique for a week or two until it becomes habit. Before long, you’ll have a calendar system tailored for your needs that makes you far more productive, focused, and less stressed.
To recap, the key steps are choosing the right calendar tool, building consistent daily routines, scheduling priorities ahead of time, managing deadlines diligently, and continually improving your system. Spending just a little time optimizing your calendar yields huge time management dividends.
What are your favorite calendar time management tricks? Share any I missed in the comments below! I’m always looking to improve my own calendar system. Together we can all take back control of our time.
How Time Management Helps Make Your Life Better
The legendary Bruce Lee once said, “If you love life, don’t waste time, for time is what life is made up of.”
There’s actually a lot of truth in that statement. Time management can drastically improve your life in the following ways.
Reduces Stress.
Stress has been dubbed the silent killer. It’s easy to understand why: Not put in check, stress can lead to headaches, chronic pain, and weakened immune system. Then follows the digestive track issues, depression, and a rapid heartbeat.
According to psychologist Jeffrey Janata, Ph.D., “Most of us experience stress when we feel as though we have a perceived lack of control over the events in our lives. Time management is being careful about how we use our time. It”s how we portion our time. Control of time can enhance our sense of control.”
With time management, you’re back in control of your life. No more rushing around, No more surprises, No more completing an assignment at the last minute. You know what to expect every day, or at least as much as possible. You’ll have planned accordingly to get everything done when needed.
Helps Get More Done.
Managing your time means you’re not wasting it on unproductive activities. Instead, you remain laser-focused on your priorities. Focus means you’re not only better suited to handle your workload, but you’re going to get more accomplished. With focus, tasks take less time.
Enables More Free Time.
If you’re able to get more done in less time, that means you’re going to have more free time. While this doesn’t mean you should always waste this extra time. It does mean you now have the time to choose to do what you want. This could be reading a book, hitting the gym, grabbing dinner with your friends, or taking an online class.
Eliminates Work-Life Conflicts.
Juggling your personal and professional lives is a challenge for those who can’t manage their time effectively. If you didn’t complete an assignment on time, you now have to stay late at work. Maybe you miss you child’s soccer game. That’s not a pleasant feeling.
When you’re able to perfect the art of time management, you’re able to spend the time where it matters most.
Short-Circuits Excuses.
Stop making excuses for your problems. Most of the time, they’re your own fault. This fault can stem from your time management.
You showed up late to a meeting with a potential employer or client — the person wasn’t happy and didn’t hire you. Mayve ou missed a deadline and got reprimanded by your boss. Or maybe, you bailed on a family member’s birthday because you had to work on the weekend.
Could all of this have been avoided if you’d managed your time properly? Ask the correct questions.
Improves Your Reputation.
No one wants to be known as the perpetually late person. Worse is the person who constantly bails on plans. When you know how to manage your time, you’ll develop a reputation as someone who’s dependable and reliable.
That’s not just good for your self-esteem, that can also lead to more opportunities in your life.
Decreases Wasted Effort and Wasted Time.
Don’t believe the myth that time management takes extra effort? The opposite is actually true. Time management actually makes your life easier. It encourages you to look for faster, more effective ways of getting things done.
Effective time management means you no longer have wasted time. Wandering around aimlessly, looking for something to do? No, you always have something productive to focus on.
Time Management Tips and Techniques From World-Renowned Founders and Entrepreneurs
Wake Up Early to Get Your Sweat On.
Richard Branson, the Virgin Group founder, wakes up incredibly early, like most other entrepreneurs. He’s awake at five a.m. in order to work out because it boosts his productivity.
“I definitely can achieve twice as much by keeping fit,” Branson tells FourHourBodyPress. “It keeps the brain functioning well.”
Operate on the “First Things First” Philosophy.
Mpowered’s Mark Sperry recommends you ask yourself two questions: Is it important? Is it urgent?
List your important and urgent items first, followed by important, but less urgent, items. “Importance trumps urgency every time.” Avoid the “tyranny of the urgent,” as most “urgent” tasks are simply not important to your success.
This is similar to the Eisenhower Matrix.
Work in Five-Minute Increments.
Successful people rely on their calendars to schedule their activities. As noted by Peter Bregman, author of “Four Seconds: All the Time You Need to Replace Counter-Productive Habits with Ones that Really Work.” This helps them check off items on their to-do-lists, as well as identify priorities. “What is it that really needs to get done today? What important items have you been ignoring? Where can you slot those things into your schedule?” writes Bergman.
However, they also divide their calendars into small increments of time. For example, to effectively run both Tesla and SpaceX, Elon Musk breaks his day into five-minute slots.
Make “Knockout Lists.”
Marcus Lemonis, entrepreneur and star of CNBC’s “The Profit,” gives great advice. Lemonis says he gets up in the morning and makes a list of the five things he wants to get done that day. Without exception, he has to get those five things done. If he ends up getting some additional things done, great, but he always has his “knockout list.”
“I just physically write it down. I have little cards in my closet in my basement. They’re long, narrow cards, with my name on top. They make really cool paper airplanes. When I’m done with them at the end of the day, I like to make paper airplanes out of them.”
The “Yesterbox.”
Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh doesn’t waste time responding to, deleting, and archiving email messages. In order to achieve “inbox zero,” he developed something called, “Yesterbox.”
As explained by Rose Leadem, “Yesterbox is Hsieh’s very own email management system. Instead of trying to tackle everything in his inbox at once, Hsieh only responds to his list of messages from the day before. Unless they are urgent, the rule of thumb is that Hsieh never responds to any of the actual day’s emails.”
The Ivy Lee Method.
This productivity hack was developed by a publicity expert. The founder of modern public relations, Ivy Lee, in 1918. Since then, it’s been recommended by experts to achieve peak production.
Here’s how it works, via James Clear:
- At the end of each workday, write down the six most important things you need to accomplish tomorrow. Do not write down more than six tasks.
- Prioritize those six items in order of their true importance.
- When you arrive tomorrow, concentrate only on the first task. Work until the first task is finished before moving on to the second task.
- Approach the rest of your list in the same fashion. At the end of the day, move any unfinished items to a new list of six tasks for the following day.
- Repeat this process every working day.
Simply put, at the end of the day, jot down what you want to accomplish first tomorrow.
Don’t Let Your Calendar Manage You.
“Calendar management is the single most important thing, especially as you get busy and have more responsibilities,” says Mary Callahan Erdoes to CNBC. Erdoes is the CEO of JPMorgan Asset Management.
“You have to be maniacally focused on owning your calendar. You must have the lists of what you need from other people and what other people need from you. What are the short-term issues that need to be dealt with? What are the long-term issues?
“Unless you can stay on top of that religiously, it will end up owning you. That’s not the way to go about staying organized and being on top of things.”
Limit Your Social Media Exposure.
“The biggest time sucks in my workday are email/Slack/social media that break up more important work. So I strictly schedule and limit how much time I spend on each,” says Raul Gutierrez, founder and CEO of Tiny Bop.
“By putting a tight cap on the amount of time I spend on have-to-do things, I work more efficiently. By assigning myself tasks in blocks, I reduce mode-switching.”
Maximize Your Time.
“I’m always trying to maximize my time,” says “Shark Tank” investor and FUBU founder Daymond John.
“For example, I’ll do my emails when I’m on a plane, instead of when I’m in the office. I try to have my team members handle as much of the meetings as possible. I’ll be involved in the last part so I don’t have to sit through five separate meetings of the same purpose. When I have personal interaction, I try to maximize that as well.”
Block Off Your Mental Prime Time.
“Identify when you are the most productive. Focus on the tasks that are the highest priority to complete during that time,” recommends Doug Bend, Bend Law Group, PC.
“To do so, eliminate distractions — such as calls and emails. Instead use the time you are at your mental best to accomplish your most important tasks.”
Want to know your mental prime prime? Read “The Perfect Workday Hours to Maximize Motivation” to guide you in the right direction.
Gamify Your To-Do List.
“I’ve enjoyed ‘gamifying’ my to-do list,” Jack Groetzinger, co-founder and CEO of SeatGeek, tells CNBC.
“I have an estimated number of minutes for all tasks. I have written software to record when I begin and end each item. Each day, I challenge myself to hit an efficiency goal. That is the number of actual minutes divided by expected minutes. The best part of playing a game by myself is that I have every spot on the leaderboard.”
Disagree and Commit.
Jeff Bezos, despite being the richest man in the world, remains hands-on with Amazon. How is Bezos able to make decisions more quickly? He uses the phrase, “disagree and commit.”
Bezos claims this saves him a lot of time. But how does it work? When you have a strong idea but don’t have everyone else on board, ask them to take a chance on you.
“If you have conviction on a particular direction even though there’s no consensus,” Bezos writes in Amazon’s 2017 shareholder letter, “it’s helpful to say, ‘Look, I know we disagree on this but will you gamble with me on it? Disagree and commit? By the time you’re at this point, no one can know the answer for sure, and you’ll probably get a quick yes.”
Take Time to Pause.
“Take a colleague and go to a cafeteria or go to a table away from your desk in your office and have lunch,” says author and entrepreneur Arianna Huffington. “Even if you take 20 minutes to do that, it’s more recharging than what so many of us do which is eating lunch while working.”
Taking “pauses” can boost your productivity, as well as decrease stress.
Say “No.”
According to Entrepreneur, Warren Buffett once said, “The difference between successful people and very successful people is that very successful people say ‘no’ to almost everything.”
It’s true. Instead of saying “yes” to everything, like helping a team member or accepting every invitation — say “no.” Especially, if your schedule is already packed.
Or, as Derek Sivers, the founder of CD Baby, puts it, “If you’re not saying — ‘HELL YEAH!’ about something — say ‘no.’”
Take Advantage of Your Downtime.
“Plan your work and work your plan,” says Nick Huzar. He is the co-founder and CEO of OfferUp. “I make sure to prioritize alone time on Sundays to focus on the team’s top priorities. This means across each department for OfferUp. I then spend the week supporting the team to execute on these priorities.”
Don’t Go it Alone.
“Entrepreneurship is a team sport. Whether finding a great co-founder, who has complementary skill sets (in my case, an old friend I met at theater camp over 20 years ago). Or picking your executive team exclusively composed of “A” players (who you can alternately delegate to, or be inspired by). You need a bunch of great teammates to be successful when creating a new business,” says Merritt Baer, CEO of TodayTix.
Additionally, learn how to master the art of delegation and outsourcing so you can lighten your workload by assigning tasks to others.
Prioritize With GTD.
Ryan Battles, is an entrepreneur and marketer. Battles writes that the best book he’s read in regard to planning daily tasks, is David Allen’s “Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity.”
“Allen instructs his clients to first do a mental dump of all of the tasks floating around in their head. Whether it is on paper or within task management software,” writes Battles. “Next, his clients set up a single inbox where all of the tasks moving forward need to be dumped into for processing.
This could be a physical bin, a computer folder, or a section of the task management software. From there, each task can have one of the following applied:
- Do it: If it takes less than two minutes, just do it.
- Defer it: Put it on the calendar or under a project list to be acted upon later.
- Delegate it: Assign someone else the responsibility of completing the task.
“With GTD, you also need to have a weekly review to check over the active projects that are on your lists. You’ll choose which ones are going to be worked on next.
Stay healthy to stay focused
Health and cognitive function as well as mental focus are intertwined. If you’re tired from a lack of sleep or on a sugar crash, there’s no way that you’re going to be able to manage your time or stay productive.
As a general rule of thumb, take care of your sleep each night to wake up refreshed and ready to go. Certain foods such as protein, leafy greens, and berries have been shown to help with focus and cognitive function. By taking care of your body and mind, you’ll be better prepared to get everything done
My Google Calendar System ️ Student, Productivity & Time Management
How do I use a calendar for time management?
(Plus Useful Time Management Tips and Advice) Here are some steps you can follow when using a calendar for time management: 1. Identify your goals To know exactly what you need to work on, you may first define your goals then decide what tasks you need to execute to accomplish them. These might be your daily, weekly or monthly objectives.
Why do you need a time management calendar?
Prioritizing your tasks helps you make progress on your most significant goals and ensures that you allocate your time and energy accordingly. With a time management calendar, you can bring order to your daily life. By having a visual representation of your schedule, you can see how your time is allocated and plan accordingly.
What is calendar management?
Calendar management is the systematic organization of meetings, events, and duties to maximize the ROI you can get over time. It covers routine but essential tasks like addressing meeting preferences, scheduling time slots, and preparing for meetings.
How can a calendar system improve time management?
Prioritize a calendar system that enhances your efficiency and aligns with your workflow, making it easier to manage your time effectively and achieve your tasks and goals with confidence. Prioritizing events and activities within your calendar can significantly contribute to effective time management.
