Dear friends and clients,

Some of my clients schedule so many business chores and appointments that they have no time for enjoying life.  And then there are those who haven’t fully developed the skill of using their calendars in managing their work lives.

That first group may start to feel enslaved, sensing that in assigning every moment to a specific task they’ve lost control of their lives.  The second group may also feel out of control, constantly playing catch-up and juggling the consequences of overdue assignments and missed appointments.

I’ve been thinking a lot about calendars myself lately, because my old system was no longer working.  I decided to make a change, but now I’m torn between two loves: I get pleasure from writing in my Franklin Planner with real ink, but how can I live without the searchability and interactivity of Outlook/Palm software?

While some productivity experts are dogmatic about maintaining calendars in a certain way, the better view is that you should find the system that best addresses your current needs.  With this issue I’ll offer some tips that may help you to enhance the effectiveness of your own calendar system.

Warm wishes,

Sharpen Your Productivity Tools!
Today’s Tool: Your  Calendar

• You have to choose just one.  Most experts emphasize that it is important that you use a single, unified calendar to keep track of not just your work but also the rest of your life.  If you have calendars on your kitchen wall, in your briefcase and on your assistant’s desk you’re bound to double book or miss things.

• But sometimes it’s not so simple.  Perhaps your job requires that you keep some dates on a shared calendar, or your billing software doesn’t talk to your PDA, or some information is too sensitive to be shared with your assistant.  If you have good reasons for keeping two calendars, a solution may be to designate one calendar as your “master,” then build the habit of coordinating dates at frequent, regular intervals.

• It’s not your TO-DO list.  The folks from FranklinCovey are among those who urge you to put a prioritized daily task list on your calendar.  For many of us, however, this just doesn’t work.  Life moves too fast, priorities shift, and the undone tasks on Monday’s page may be forgotten by Wednesday.   Action items that are not inherently date- or time-sensitive might be better tracked on lists that may accompany, but are not actually on, your calendar pages.

• It’s for appointments and day-specific reminders.  If your calendar is cluttered up with things that you’d like to accomplish, but don’t actually have to, then you may miss or ignore critical calendar entries.  Productivity expert David Allen offers good advice when he says “you need to trust your calendar as sacred territory, reflecting the exact hard edges of your day’s commitments, which should be noticeable at a glance.”  Use your calendar only for time- or date-specific action or information.

• Check constantly.  Looking at your calendar frequently throughout the day may help you to get more work done.   You need to focus not only on your next appointment, but also on the blocks of time between commitments.  If you visualize the available time, and match it to your tasks and priorities, you can make better decisions about what to do next, and how much time to spend on it.

• Keep a diary?  For some people, a daily calendar can serve another important function: as a log of the day’s key events, a record of time spent on various tasks, and the first place to record important information.   One two-calendar approach that sometimes works well is to designate a PDA or monthly page as the master calendar, then use daily pages for recording events as they occur.    

• Match your schedule to your priorities.  One benefit of maintaining a comprehensive calendar is that it can provide a vivid overview of how you are spending your time.  Regularly review your actual schedule and ask whether the distribution of your time matches your priorities and values.
  
  
• Take back your life. Is your schedule so packed with tasks that there’s no room left for life?   Then take back some time for yourself.  One client now uses a color code to set aside time for renewal.  Looking ahead on her monthly calendars, she uses a highlighter to mark a few scattered days as pink for self-care, like massages or manicures, and green for professional growth.    As each colored day draws closer, she blocks out specific time on her daily pages and actually makes appointments.