Do You Run Your Calendar?
Or are you letting things just happen?
Or are you letting it just happen?
🤔Does your calendar look like overlapping meetings from the time you start your day until it's time to stop working?
🤔Are there important things that aren't showing up on your calendar - upcoming days off, times to plan and reflect, time to eat lunch?
🤔Can you clearly see if your priorities (assuming you know what they are) are showing up on your calendar in the right proportions?
Photo by Gaining Visuals on Unsplash
If you're like most people I talk with (and me in the past), you probably are answering yes, no, no to the three questions.
If we want to effectively lead a team or an organization, we need to be able to lead ourselves, and that starts with how we spend our time.
Are you being intentional with how you use your 24 hours or are you letting them just happen?
I met with a new client this week and a significant chunk of time was spent working through how they wanted to spend their weeks. We worked through…
How many hours per week they felt like was reasonable to work to do what their role requires and to still feel like they were able to prioritize their personal life
We focused on the top 3-5 priorities they had and the relative percentage of time they wanted to spend on them.
We categorized and color coded their existing meetings on their calendar so they could easily visualize how they were prioritizing their time
We mapped in travel time to the events outside of the office so that there was space for that.
We got specific about what was going to be done in chunks of working time.
We left space for unexpected things
We prioritized planning and reflection time (during the work week)
We focused on when they wanted to work on different things - preserving the morning for planning-oriented activities and grouping their team meetings into the afternoons of two days so they could do less task-switching
We identified what made sense to do on the weekends…and why work was getting pushed to then.
This may sound very tactical, but it's critical to make sure that your calendar is setting you up for success.
Most of us live by what's on our calendar so if our priorities aren't reflected there, we're probably not maximizing the impact we could make.
The quotes for reflection below highlight Dan Pink’s research about when we work and how we can optimize based on our own cycles. My greatest takeaway from reading his book was that I would benefit from moving my early morning meetings to later in the day because my best time to do quality heads down work is first thing. This isn’t what works for everyone so think about when you do your best for different types of work.
You may feel like you don’t have control over the meetings in your calendar (and maybe there are limitations), but you do have control of the meetings that you have set up.
Look at your calendar 2-3 weeks out.
🙋♀️Can you proactively block your best working time and move standing meetings to days or times that allow you to minimize task switching and be focused?
🙋♀️Can you prioritize planning and reflection time?
🙋♀️Do you have time calendared for well-being (health appointments, workouts, massage, etc.)?
🙋♀️Do you need to rework the cadence of 1:1 discussions with your team?
🙋♀️What would an ideal work week look like?
If you want to set yourself up for success as a leader this year, start with some work on your calendar. If I can help you, let me know or schedule a deep dive planning session.