Setting up a Calendar That Actually Works

The basis of everything you do, whether at home or in the office, is going to be your digital calendar. This might be in Outlook or other calendar app/website of choice. You need a clear plan for each working day that tells you what you are going to be doing at all times. Everything else follows from this.

Your weekly plan

The very first thing to do to set up this system is to create a set of recurring appointments for all the tasks and activities that are a fundamental part of your job. So, for instance, if you’re a salesperson and you need to revise your material once a week, set up a recurring appointment labelled "Revise sales material" for example every Wednesday.

That’s right, you create ‘appointments’ to set aside time for the work you do, not just for meetings or calls. This is the key difference to the way that I used Outlook before, and frankly most people do. Your calendar isn’t just for meetings or appointments (where you actually need to be somewhere or talk to someone else), but for everything you do as part of your job.

Of course, in practice, things will change each week, so your set of recurring appointments are just there as a template to start you off. You will have different projects and tasks to work on, meetings will come up, and you will have to adjust your calendar as you go along. Some of those recurring appointments might even be deleted entirely some weeks. The point is, even if you don’t have a single specific planned piece of work, you still have in principle a basic schedule to work to.

Often you will have to do this adjustment during the course of each day (e.g., when a new meeting is planned) but it’s better to set some time aside at the end of each working day to do your planning for the following day, and if necessary, the rest of the week. It’s also a good idea to set aside some time at the end of the week to do some planning for the following week (more on this later as well).

Think about what other regular things you need to set aside time for. For instance, training, reviewing material, catchups with managers or other colleagues. For my sales job, I have recurring appointments to review contact lists, find new leads, revise sales material, look at marketing tasks, amongst others. On a Friday afternoon, I have two hours blocked off for general training. Often, I end up having to reduce that because meetings and other work gets in the way. But it’s there. I can consciously move it, reduce the time, decide to delete it for this week, whatever. It’s in my face.

In this suggested setup, the week is essentially your major planning unit. Now depending on your job, this may not be the case. For instance, you may actually want to try planning on a monthly basis, but the week will be a good enough unit for most.

Number of working hours

While setting up your weekly template, you also need to decide how many hours you need to work during the week. If you are employed, this will likely depend on your employer, so for example you may be contracted to work 37.5 hours a week, which means you would have to work an average of 7.5 hours a day. To set this up within your calendar, you need to have enough appointments to cover 7.5 hours excluding lunch and breaks (the subject of a future post).

The first and last appointments

The first appointment of the day should be when you start work. If you start at 8am and finish at 4pm, then your first appointment should start at 8am and your last appointment should end at 4pm. You must not have any gaps within appointments during your workday. So, when you set up your initial set of recurring appointments, you need to make sure you are covering your days in their entirety. Even if there’s genuinely nothing repeating, then all you need to do is create three appointments for each day, labelled "Morning work", "Lunch", and "Afternoon work". You would then replace your morning and afternoon appointments with whatever actual tasks you need to do.

Availability during work appointments

These appointments that you create to do regular work that’s not a meeting which involves other people should be marked as free/available in your calendar. This will show that you are still in theory available for meetings and other tasks as they come up.

The reality is that if you schedule say 2 hours on the Thursday to do some project work, you may still have to go to an important client meeting that will be scheduled one hour into that work. So, it’s inevitable that you will have to adjust your timetable to reflect this. However, having a plan for the week will allow you to focus on work and have a reasonable idea of what you will be doing and when, while allowing for the inevitable meetings and other distractions that will come up.

Of course, don’t mark an appointment as free if you absolutely must do the work then. At least that will then force colleagues to come and ask you about it if they want to schedule you into a meeting during that time.

Reminders

Something else you want to put on to all your appointments are reminders. These will prompt you during your day to give you an idea of when your next appointment is coming up. It’s particularly good to make sure your first appointment of the day has a reminder on it, as it will effectively be your signal that you need to start work soon, especially if you are still having your breakfast at 7:50am...

Respecting your appointments

There’s no point adding in all these appointments if you don’t actually respect them. So, if you add in a time for a task and then just keep on doing what you were doing before, then you’re not making use of the scheduling time you put in earlier. Having said that, there are always exceptions. If you’ve started a task and feel you are ‘on a roll’, it may be wise to keep on going till you come to a natural break, rather than stop and take the break, before going on to your next task. But make sure that’s a considered decision—is that next task lower priority, can it be rescheduled to later in the day or tomorrow? The reality is that there are lots of calls on your time, and you don’t want to end up falling behind on different tasks.

Knowing what you’re doing

Regardless of how many you have, you go from one appointment to another, with your breaks either incorporated into the appointments or set up as appointments by themselves (more on this later). This means that when you start work, you have a clear plan for the day, and you know what you are supposed to be doing at all times.