Lessons

Lesson Info

How to Use Calendar Effectively Part 2

She could see right now he's we're starting to see your year take shape right? Like we're starting to see you like and you're looking at this and going alright which month january is the beginning of the year for you you got traveling backto work so is there a big idea you're gonna push for it? Okay, so there'll be a big idea there and then maybe a big idea in february but he starts to see this your shape up and goes, oh my goodness for the first five months I've got big ideas all over the place maybe I should take you off you know what I mean is off may is also vacation in you so that's that's that's a day off so you can actually remove that if you want on dh just put the travel like you did here because up here this is kind of the identify rhe so you can kind of do that now don't you worry about it again? You can't mean this is more of an exercise of here's how it kind of works. So when I do this and this is one one trigger point, maybe is that you don't necessarily put if you don't ...

have a theme for that month don't put anything in that block, right? So you've got these four months you get this you can start see your year takes shape and you could do the same thing in a digital calendar as well when you start to allocate your months and this is where you're gonna want to be in yearly view that's where you kind of say, ok, this is what this month means to me in terms of this or in terms of that and you're making marked progress because, you know now by just by writing that down marking that that marches area contest one threat you going to everything you can't getting publicity, right? So it's different projects combined comprised of this this larger idea, right? So that's going to be his focus, his overarching focus and that's what? Something like a tool like this khun do right? So if you're if you're booking clients like you could say my you could do for clients client focuses february is mary client focus and marches john client focused you could do that again. There's no real wrong way to distribute these but it just gives you that really nice trigger point for the higher level stuff. Awesome. Awesome. Thanks. So you guys each have one that you're gonna be able to take with you? Do you have any to have anything from the yeah, I want to share an example of someone's color coordinating on their calendar, so this is from carl okay? And they say personal is yellow, work is orange health body emotions in mind, blue is wealth, career, finances and fun green is relationships, friends, family and spiritually. So just one example of how people are color coordinating work for everyone and you and you can tell that when someone starts to break down their colors like that, that they're really being mindful about what they're moving forward with, and I mean it there's a set up there, a lot of people that got set ups just happen with aps no it's, mindset oriented it's like, I want to I want to see this thing grow, I want to see this thing flourish, so when you start doing stuff like that that's, when you're gonna be able to really kind of move the higher level stuff forward, so what don't we put on calendars? I don't know tasks, tasks. Yeah, so isa calendar a task manager now it's a time management tool, but it's not something. It basically again provides a really nice framework, both yearly monthly, weekly, etcetera, quantify it gives you that a bit of a framework again, a bit of a structure it helps augment. We're already built in your task manager and there's a lot of tat, by the way, the task manager's out there and I'm gonna put together a list of the ones that they're also in the workbook to the list of the past matters have talked about it I have living documents that are linked within the workbook, which is great so because some of these app says we all know come and go they don't last forever or they get bought or whatever so I have living documents for all of the elements of the productivity's workbook and now you're going to have the same thing for counter tools so that way you can say okay, well, how does this work? How does that work? Asana is one of those ones that links directly to counter omni focus does too there's a lot of men out there that use the calendar to help you decide how the day's gonna look oh, I have too many appointments today I know I can't do these tasks, so I'm going to move them to another area they link up and that's where that they should work together, they shouldn't work independently, they should work together one does something better than the other right high level thinking visual stuff boom calendar task manager is not so much for that it's more of the execution so ideation for lack of a better term execution the task manager here some of the tools that you can use that our web based to help you kind of make the most of your calendar selection your calendars were using their digital doodle is one so we had somebody mentioned the chat room that they wanted to use a people are always asking for their time and they won't have meetings and all that stuff so what doodle does is uh that's a mouthful what duel does is it deals with delivering know your calendar appointments so basically what you could do is you have a dual accounts free and there's also a premium component web based and what I have set up is I have ah specific doodle page and if people look at it they get a really good view of when I'm available on when I'm not so instead of going hey can you meet with me on friday? John will hold on let me check my schedule send send sends and email back and forth instead it's I'd like to have a meeting with you great here's my doodle go take a look at it and then they can create a pole within there saying they can select specific times that they might want to meet with you so you can give them a cz many options as you want there's some front and work you may want to do there or you can email them a link to a pool that says here are my times that are available now why would you want to do the latter well by sharing your doodle link especially if you're trying to get people that are your superiors to play ball if you send him like here's my due to link feel free to schedule you know I'll see what I can dio that doesn't play very well right but if you have a link that you can share say hey you know what I've got I'm working on that project from one to three today I'd like to meet with you hero I've gotta pull here let's try to figure it we can do it becomes more of a passive thing as opposed to uh you know it allows you to set those limits without coming off like you're inflexible do you understand what I'm saying so it allows you to kind of say hey I'd like to meet with you let's make it happen and let's not do the email back and forth dance to make it happen okay with doodle premium you can get like theme it and all that stuff if you want I like doodle a lot but you know and you could try the premium I think for thirty days but it's not necessary for a lot of people you could just use the free version fantastic al is another great application for the mac and iphone that I used and the reason I like it and I'm not sure of the windows or android equivalent maybe someone in the chat will know and I'll be able to hear back from that, but uh it allows you to enter appointments and natural language, so callin it just started teo itjust started teo, but this one has been this one was the king for a while. The reason I like fantastic alice because this has been doing this for a while quick cows also another one that does it so you could type in remind me to read cults of mac today and read you khun second schedule with reminders you could say you know, have ah have coffee with chris at six pm tomorrow and it would parse it out remember I showed you drafts in the earlier segment, we talked about capturing there's a thing called parts to fantastic out, so if you don't want to open fantastical on your iphone and you want to just go into your portal of entry drafts let's say you could type in have meeting with jennifer at three p m on tuesday send defend parts to fantastic al it puts it in a fantastical boom it's in your calendar and fantastic house thanks to google calendar and outlook and all those other ones as well calendar on the mac so it allows you to sink allows you to use the color coding if you want just for those people who want to like quickly get a calendar entry in people who are saying, hey, I don't like the right stuff out. This is an audio, siri write any of that stuff audio is, like, remind me to our dictation on the mac, for that matter, you can you do really quickly and easily really great feedback about fantastical in the chat rooms is, well, it's so, so good. So, um, some of the other tools that you can use, uh, actually, I want before, before we move on to another one there's one called schedule once, which I haven't put up here. It's very much like doodle, but a bit more robust. Um, I know a lot of people that use it, but before we before we wrap this part up because there's a lot I want to find out, like, in terms of calendar like, can you see yourself? Like, do you figure that you've been using your calendar in a way, that's been effective? Or do you feel that's been kind of like one of those little pieces that could have used some tweaking? Jennifer, what about you? I could see the use of using the that one because it gives because I am more of a visual, a person close to being able to see that knocks it out. Right, like you can take a look at and go ok, this is my year going on, by the way, on the ho on the version that hangs in the back of a door at the bottom, it said has, like, a little key, so legend so you could say this what this color means, and this is what this court means for demonstration purposes, it was easier to hang out this way. I think I'd have to play around with the tools you just mentioned up there to see that rex and the nice thing about these tools first off doodle it's, its bare bones like it's super simple if you spend, if you schedule it for one meaning and it works, you're like, oh, that's lawson now, I don't have to keep emailing people back and forth, and if you get the right person to do it so client, once you get one client toe by into it, then you're gonna wanna have replying to buy into it, and then maybe you'll be able to use the whole personalized doodle thinks that here's my schedule that you can fit me in on if you can or what not, and fantastic how honestly at this point is just a really quick gateway, so these ones are fairly simple. There are mean and I know a lot of people who use they think their google counter up to a whole bunch of other things and outlook calendar and all that but yeah, I mean, starting with this is a great place because it gives you that visual sense and then these air more for like the everyday like how do I make sure that I don't hyper schedule myself kind of thing go ahead I thinkit's a great idea I give a shot my having team for months and seeing a mixed visual make sure you double booking myself on certain days and you work with a team like you work with a team of the odd in office and stuff rather you so you mean this is great for like colors for different team members or I mean, I was talking teo was talking about this is like this would be great for like oranges for one type and green is for another and white board up this this has to be cancelled or this has to be moved like you can shift stuff around so it gives you that that visual but without necessarily the permanence that people kind of freak out about um and you can move things around which is kind of this and you are you using you must be using at least one one of those tools I just see it max calendar okay, so if you use fantastical do you need to use it in addition to calendar or so you can actually stand alone on its own? So this is like if you look it's in the menu bar so my calendar is never open if I just click on the menu bar I see what my calendar looks likes doesn't give you like the years view and months it can it can especially on the iphone app I generally try toe gives me this view that's the default view which I kind of like but it will also below it it'll tell you like you could say how many days you wanted to show you so I've got I think I've got three days that it shows me and you can scroll up and down and the iphone app also supports natural language entry as well I can't remember how much it is though so offhand it's but it's a listed in the some of the resources that I've talked about jamie would you I know you said that you've got your calendar you seem to have a pretty good handle on so but are any of these things something that you feel that you could probably I want to say this is a good way to you know doing my mething like actually doing it like joining the dots what you want to do but this is like a skeleton you know like framework of it. So when you have something like that is really sure you can actually say it this is what you have in place. Then when you you know what you have coincides and something you can add on to it, you know, and then you put, like, colors it's a very good way, because it's a cord it right, you can actually. Oh, this is actually I have to do this and this and so you don't have to, like, read. And so what did I do that but you can really know this is the important key highlights of it. And then after that, the rest will follow you. You know, you have jonah, right? Jenna is more extensive. You can go on there, but he we want to have something to have the whole picture in. This one thing, I think this is very clear cut in a nice thing because I looked at this creative life thing and I can go all right now, it's mine map it out, right? Like it gives you that. Yeah, jumping off point and that's. What they should be doing is these idea points. Thes themes should be jumping off points to help you plan that grab hooks, you know, absolutely, yeah, because, I mean all of this is all about holding on like like you want to be able to manage this tasks and by doing that you're in a minute and this is this is again it's a nice hybrid tool along with some of the other apse that we've talked about we have what we have in the chat room anything yeah, I've got a question here going back to the paper calendar sure two thumbs fresh productions wants to know on the wall calendar how should we markoff what day it is right now and she remark up the past days I scribble mine off but it makes me tense when I start running out of days on my calendar I don't I don't do I don't market like I don't cross our days on my calendar I keep it fairly open because once I start to cross off yeah it's remember the death watch thing I was talking about first years almost definite I don't do that so but, um what I what what I have done in the past is I've created a calendar and google calendar that specific for like a particular project like if I'm working with with like when I was doing comedy and we're trying to build up to a ship and I want to get better at that like we wanted workshop our sketches, I used the jerry seinfeld method go figure don't break the chain which I don't know if you guys have heard of this but basically every time you do something it just has to be the one thing like if you work if you he worked on jokes every day and every time he did he put an x next to it and this exes would all eventually join and when he broke the chain then he knew that he had fallen down journaling is probably the best example of where I do that and I feel like garbage when I don't journal now it took a while think I've been journaling consistently like this for twice daily for six months now before it was just once daily was to close out the day to close off the loops, but now I'm doing the opening of the day as well with it, but when I break that chain I feel terrible I feel absolutely terrible because I've obstructed my system, I've let my systematic I've not done what I set out to do. I'm closed or open my day properly, so yeah, I mean, I don't really close I don't really mark off days as they go by because again, I'm not tracking time, right? I guess that's what I mean I am by default by working, moving things forward, but I'm not really tracking time per se in that regard do we have anything else from there we did uh well well um comes back teo setting agreements with ourself and sure me ask the question what happens if you're not able to deliver on those agreement you make with yourself? It says sometimes feels like that happens to me okay, well if you're gonna break agreements with anybody initially it's best agree break the way we talked about this near the beginning of the day where it's like some people just aren't going to get it right they're not gonna understand why you're not answering e mail at nine pm at night where they're not gonna understand why you can't just, you know, jump when they say jump in you go how high they're not gonna get that so when you when you're dealing with agreements with yourself, it's a great place to test and see how over committing you're becoming how much commitments you're taking on yourself? Um derek sybers has done a great ted talk on, you know, like keeping your keeping your ideas in house and keeping them because once you start to put them out there, then you're giving that accountability out there and putting that out there for people to see I like to do that thing to talk about that more on day three with idea management excuse me, but the problem with doing that is especially with the internet is once you start to say I'm gonna have this out like the book november fifth it's going to be out? I'm like, okay, there's my there's, my stop point there's the agreement I've made not just with myself, but with others, so when you start to break those agreements with yourself, you need to look and journaling again helps with this he's ah, I feel like crap today because I didn't do what I said I would do here and when when it's agreements were talking about, it shouldn't be this task. I didn't d'oh that I said I would do it should be more along the lines of, you know, anything that you've scheduled, like working out? I have I keep doing this time, I've done it so many times where I'm like I should be doing yoga, I should be doing this, I should be doing that and I can like I rationalize now they call it crap rationalization, whatever I'm like well, I was too busy didn't have time or, you know what? I'm not that fat no like seriously and your brain comes up with better and better excuses, right? Like, you know, because you try to fight it, you try to fight back that resistance you the stronger you get, the stronger the resistance gets, right, you know, like, you know, I can't wait to do creative live it's gonna be so awesome why are you doing creative what are you talking about like you know what I mean like those kind of things happen right? So so the same thing happens with those agreements is that the more you keep them with yourself the better you're going to get at keeping them with others but it's a great testing ground to say you know I'm missing them maybe I need to re look at my system maybe I need to look at my approach maybe I'm doing too many things maybe I need to put some things on the back burner again somebody who's loves writing comedy and I want to write a screenplay again like everybody um I want to do that but I know that I won't be able to give it my best shot I will also want to write another book after the one that's just coming out but I also know that I have to be very aware of my time constraints and my energy more so than anything else so it's a great that's a great proving ground and you don't b and j also don't be too hard on yourself because I mean if it becomes a pattern and your journaling and you're keeping tabs on it then make change then you know take action but if it's only happened you know if it happens rarely and you are able to look back but look what else I've moved forward then just you know, celebrate those successes just as much as you acknowledge the failures of maybe dropping the ball every once in a while so I want to know there's a lot there's a lot right like totally everytime day one I knew was gonna be like totally full of like people are like oh ho my head there's so much so you know what I say is capture it capture on get it out of your head so we've focused on task we focused on going beyond your to do list the task is the thing if we focus on task time is part of that quality over quantity right? And we're going to keep coming back to that backto that going beyond your to do list so not just looking at the hay I have to do groceries and our buy groceries do laundry to groceries but and also you know, like answer emails it's like why why are we doing this? I'm answering emails because I want to build more clients I'm building the pieces off where because I want to help more people know I'm going to these appointments because I want to get better at that kind of stuff um so there's become projects and we cannot and I think a lot of time what happens is people who say I'm so busy I'm so busy they haven't you haven't distilled it down to like a project, they said I have so much to do, but but we all do when you organize it and put it into a system into a structure of foundation that you've established, you can really take a look at it and go, oh, all right, this is what I can do now, faced with the whole idea of context, what I have with, you know, the energy I have with where I am all that stuff, okay? And then we also talked about calendar management one o one, so maybe how to use a calendar and new way different approaches make your year on now year, so really lame tagline, but I've been using it, so I'm going to stick with it. Um, the whole season, you think that you and these new year calendars air are actually quite reasonably priced. So new year dot net, go check it out. Jessie philips is ah mean and literally it was like on idea. I need a big calendar. That's. What? His idea? What? I need a big calendar to put all my stuff on and he made one, and now people get to use it. And this has been such a huge help for may um, and we talk about idea management on on the last day, we'll get a chance to kind of revisit this a bit more and maybe figure out what goes on here, not necessarily everything will go on here some stuff won't even make it up here, but I cross I don't want a checkmark stuff off across it off because when you look at the check works there's still, they seem kind of open to me. Still, they seem kind of like, well, we kind of covered it there's more and I know there's more, but I like crossing it off. It's done it's completely done so some of the stuff we focused on before we take it to for some final questions and stuff um, you need to build what I call an achievement structure and that's, not just a clock fact, the clock is very little to do with it needed foundation. You need task management system, you need a place where you can capture curate cannot connect, curate, and then you need a place where you can, uh, where you khun, complete them and then calibrate them, right? And then this is part of that achievement structure. Your calendar is part of that. Projects are part of your cheapest are the apse that you decide to use, whichever you're using if using, ever know nami focus like we are great if you're using a sauna and google keep that's fine, remember, those digital tools are the ones for longer term stuff papers great for the gateway stuff for the initial capture or if you don't want to look like you're not paying attention to what somebody's saying when they're actually giving you some important information? Okay, so build that achievement structure and there's more to this structure than what I've touched on today, which we're gonna get to tomorrow with email man has been such, but once you have that in place, the achieving starts toe happen instead of just the doing right. I did when when you say I did, that sounds final sounds good, but I achieved that that sound better, fuller right? So when you set up, you won't upset so everyone's talking about earlier on where we go, but I've got, you know, there's, other people, there's clients I'm dealing with when you set things up, when you put that structure in place, when you start to change your default so that they work for you, then you're not going to be upsetting not just the people that you're dealing with employees, clients, family, kids, you're going toe not upset yourself in the process. Upset it, part of overwhelmed, right. You know, when you're trying to do all the stuff, you guys get like knots in your stomach, like I can't get all this stuff behind. It feels really know. But when you have that set up there, you know where you can go and where do you go? You go back to your tent, right? You have that place. That place is so important, it's. Not a happy place all the time, so I'm not going to say go to your happy place, because it's not always happy, but it's, it's, it's your place, and you get to build it.