Lessons

Lesson Info

Calendar

Next up, we're going to talk about an area essential to digital organization, your calendar. We could teach an entire course on calendars, productivity and goal setting. In fact, Jonathan does have a course dedicated to this, but what we're actually talking about here and in the to do list lecture is an introduction to how we can make use of digital and analog tools to better organize our time calendars. Always make me think of one of my favorite quotes by american author Annie Dillard. How we spend our days is of course how we spend our lives, what we do with this hour and that one is what we are doing. Anne is poetically relaying a critical point to us, how we plan and structure our day to day. Time matters. If you're trying to get anything done in this world, you need to be able to hold yourself responsible. You need to be able to keep yourself on track, stay organized and own your time real progress happens as an accumulation of daily effort, consistency and self accountability. Wh...

en we know how we spend our time, we can better understand the stories of our lives and we gain control to change or evolve those stories to get our calendar under control. We're going to follow our number one rule for digital organization. Everything needs to have one home ideally in the cloud. This means we want to have one calendar system ideally with all of our meetings, appointments and obligations in one place, This means one calendar view with everything on it with this approach, Your calendar will serve as a record of your actual time usage. This means that everything yes, everything work. Personal and social should be there by keeping everything on one calendar. We can get a real sense of what our days and hours look like. Only then can we truly manage our time well After all our work and personal lives do not operate in silos. An easy way to implement this one calendar approach and still keep everything organized is by setting up sub calendars for all of the main areas of your life. But having one calendar interface to view everything in one place, you can name your calendars anything you want and choose a color for each calendar. That way you're going to be able to see where your time is going and not going at a glance. Maya and I both use and love this approach and we're not the only ones productivity experts like cal Newport's and the folks at asian efficiency are also fans of robust calendar systems. So let's set up your calendar system first you'll need to choose a single cloud based calendar service such as google calendar outlook or ICloud to be your calendar home and then disable all other calendars that have been set up on your devices from now on. You're going to use the single calendar service on every device. Most of you will already have a calendar system. You're at least partially using based on whether you are an iphone android or Windows phone user so you can just go ahead and designate that calendar as your one calendar. Note that even if you are on an iphone mac or windows, you can still synchronize with non native services like google calendar or outlook as your preferred server. But in most cases it will just be easier to use the native synchronization service provided by your cell phone manufacturer. Ultimately. Which server you synchronize with doesn't matter all that much. So pick whichever is comfortable for you. You're going to open that calendar up to this week and next we're going to create sub calendars for every major area of your life. These categories aren't set in stone. You can create a few sub calendars for now and then modify titles and colors later. How you do this grouping is up to you, you can go broad such as having calendars just for work and personal or go even deeper and break apart the types of personal and work activities. Common sub calendar categories include admin, work meetings, growth and personal development, social and play and health body. I typically prefer to go more detailed and personally have around five or 6 active sub calendars. Some people even use their calendars to encourage habit changes and bio hacking such as getting more sleep or keeping regular mealtimes now. Open up your calendar to next week's schedule and input all of your key activities for each sub calendar. If you're one of those people who feel like they never have time for anything, then you're gonna want to include as much detail here as possible. This is going to allow you to gain insights around where you are wasting time and where your scheduling doesn't match up with your priorities. Take a look at the whole week. Is this what you want in your week to look like? Are you going to feel proud of yourself? Accomplished satisfied. Nourished by the end of the week, Is there anything that you're already dreading chances? Are you can make a few tweaks to your schedule, such as pre planning your workouts or time with your partner or kids to reap some major benefits from now on. It's important that every time you make a plan you added to your calendar, not to a post, It note not in your memory, but in the one home for all of your scheduling commitments. Now. For some of you getting into the habit of adding everything into your calendar may be difficult or may seem like a waste of time, especially if you've been managing everything in your head up until now. But remember, your brain is for having ideas, not for holding them. What's more having everything in the cloud instead of in your head or on paper makes it possible to share with others such as your partner or colleagues or to use a calendar booking system to automate scheduling down the line. So in the end it will actually end up saving you a lot of time if you just keep meticulous records in your calendar and more importantly it brings visibility to your schedule and routines, making you more self accountable when it comes to your time management. If you're finding that keeping a detailed calendar isn't really in your wheelhouse and is actually causing you more stress. Well no worries. Keeping this type of detailed calendar isn't necessarily for absolutely everyone, though you may surprise yourself, We do recommend that everyone in this course try out this approach for at least a week or two if you're intuitive organizational type is striver and you like the idea of this system but you're having trouble maintaining it Well we suggest you simplify and start out using only one or even two subcategories like work and personal and don't beat yourself up too badly if you forget to input something, the whole point is to get your tools working for you not to cause you more stress if you're intuitive organizational type is indifferent or you just realize you don't want to keep such a detailed calendar, you may want to try out keeping a paper. One calendar, some in different types actually prefer carrying a paper agenda and having free space to draw brainstorm and doodle, just like we do with an online calendar, you can use a color highlighter or pattern system for designating the different areas of your life once you've figured out what system works best for you, you'll want to set up a regular weekly calendar maintenance session, something that works especially well is a single weekly session for cleaning up all areas of your digital life, especially your calendar to do list and email or you can set aside a separate session designated only for regular calendar planning. This is time that you spend thinking ahead and making time for things you need to achieve in the coming week, you'll want to set up a regular day and time for this weekly calendar planning session. A common practice is to spend at least half an hour at the end of your work week to plan the upcoming week. We suggest setting up a fixed 30 minute recurring slot in your calendar for planning ahead. This is going to be easier for some people than others, depending on your intuitive organizational type but give it a go at this time. We'd like to address a few common concerns for those new to this kind of calendar system. How do I manage scheduling changes for most of us are scheduled inevitably changes. Things come up. We end up on a long call with an old friend, we take an unexpected nap. Life happens your calendar is merely a planning tool and no one expects your calendar to be set in stone. Remember the whole point of getting digitally organized is getting our tools to work for us. One recommendation we do have is to try to immediately update your calendar to reflect changes. Remember your calendar is a record of your actual time usage, not just a wish list. What's more once you get into the groove of things, it's likely that other people or software systems will actually be relying on your calendar to determine your availability. So even if the changes are in the past, we suggest you take a few minutes at the end of your day to update your calendar as to what actually happened so that you have an accurate and complete picture of your schedule. This is one of the reasons we also recommend setting up your calendar to never delete past events. What about privacy concerns? Especially when it comes to personal and private meetings easy. If your work requires you to have a public calendar, you can set only your work sub calendar to public. All of your other sub calendars can stay on a private setting. That's the beauty of this sub calendar system. What about if my work requires me to use multiple calendar services for example, outlook, google calendar, ICloud calendar. If you're not able to migrate to one calendar system, we still recommend you use a single calendar interface so that it's easy for you to check your schedule without constantly juggling across multiple calendars. You can do this by sinking and exporting your calendars to one platform such as Google calendar or by sinking to a 3rd Party calendar app. In addition to the standard apps that come on your devices, there are dozens of other calendar apps. Fantastical and mold skins. Time page are especially popular with IOS users. What if I prefer a paper calendar system to truly stay organized? Do I have to transition to a digital calendar system? No of course if you prefer a paper calendar system that is totally up to you. You can be super organized just using a paper system and some digital minimalists even prefer this approach. But as we said before in this day and age a digital calendar is generally the easiest way to go with calendar invites an auto scheduling tools. Keeping a digital calendar has never been easier and if you choose to go analog you are going to end up doing a lot more manual entry work and exponentially more communication work sharing your plans and R. S. V. P. Into invitations the old fashioned way. But if you're a paper purist or a real digital minimalist and still prefer keeping a physical agenda book, that is totally fine. We do however, recommend that you follow the same one calendar principles as for digital calendar ring one calendar home different color groupings for each activity type and regular maintenance. And what about calendar reminders. How and when you set reminders is up to you and your personal preference for notifications in general, we recommend using meeting reminders only when you need them so that you're not constantly being bombarded with meeting notifications. Great. So now you should have your calendar de cluttered and backed up to the cloud. You're going to be able to access it from each of your digital devices, saving you time and bringing transparency to your day to day scheduling. This is great for all of the events and meetings that you need to keep track of. But what about the little one off tasks you have piling up everywhere. Go ahead and join us in the next lecture to learn how we can keep track of those two.