Ever find yourself falling behind on your calendar events? Happens to me on an almost daily basis, which is why a recent post from Andre Kibbe had me going “aha!”.
Kibbe notes, and quite correctly so, that relying on your calendar as a to-do list is a recipe for disaster. Why? If you include everything on your calendar — including fixed appointments and more free-floating events and tasks — your schedule will get thrown out of whack the moment something derails you, such as a visit from your boss during a time in which you planned to work on a project.
After an interruption, you’d then have two options: return to your original task and push everything else into the future, or skip the original task for now and reschedule it for the next day. Neither way works well. Either you’re setting yourself up for a very long day, or you’re buying into the illusion that you’ll have more time tomorrow (doubtful). I tend to fall into the latter camp, with the result being that Friday nights (or weekends) often include a flurry of frantic activity as I try to clear my plate for the next workweek.
But there’s a better approach. Use your calendar primarily for what Kibbe calls “hard landscape” items — that is, externally committed appointments like a conference call or staff meeting. If you have a high-focus activity pending that’ll take at least a few hours to complete, such as writing a report, block out that time as well. Then create an action list for those arbitrary tasks that have no firm times attached; you can now attend to them during the newly discovered white space on your calendar. Less stress, more productivity. Hooray!
(image by anna banana via Flickr, CC 2.0)
