Two simple productivity hacks: regain control of your appointments

Two simple productivity hacks: regain control of your appointments

February: the month when reality catches up with the first New Year’s resolutions. Caught out? An overfull calendar is often to blame. Do you sometimes feel more like a prisoner of appointments than their designer? I know that feeling very well from my professional past. Looking back, I can say: the larger the organisations you work in, the more energy it takes to retain control over your own #Appointments.

Good news! Two simple #Productivity hacks can help you regain control. These straightforward hacks, which I learned from Eric Partaker, can make your #TimeManagement more effective.

The ideal weekly calendar

Create a new calendar in your calendar tool—Outlook or similar—that you can lay over your actual calendar like a template. Now imagine you could plan your week exactly as you wish.

Start your entries on Monday morning with “getting up”, the week’s first appointment, and end on Sunday evening with going to bed, the last appointment. Alongside work blocks, plan time in your ideal week for family, friends, sport, walks, meditation, reading and simply being with yourself. Then make every appointment in that week recur throughout the year. Your “ideal weekly calendar”, repeating exactly every week, is complete.

Review and look ahead

Set aside at least an hour on any day of the week to review the past week and look ahead to the next. From now on, this becomes the MOST IMPORTANT appointment in your week. Ideally you should never move it, and you must at least never cancel it without replacing it!

Now take out your “ideal weekly calendar” and overlay it like a template on the past week and the coming one. Comparing the coming week with your ideal calendar, decide how you want to adjust your appointments: where will you say NO to other people’s meeting requests and YES to your ideal?

It is that simple. You are back at the wheel, shaping your time and your life more consciously around your own wishes and goals. Give it a try!