Permission to Schedule Time for Tasks - Granted
By Tana M. Mann Easton, Lead Efficiency Engineer
One of the most powerful time management tricks I teach is scheduling time with yourself to complete your tasks. For many people, their calendar is a space that they freely open to anyone who wants to grab units of their time for whatever reason. They treat meeting requests as subpoenas. It doesn’t matter the reason they were invited, what else they need to get done, if they would actually be helpful in the meeting or not; if a meeting evite is sent, then they feel they must accept. Their calendars feel out of their own control, and it fills up of its own volition.
But these people are forgetting that your computer calendar is not just an application. It is a visual representation of actual real-life time. When you allow anyone and everyone to completely fill your calendar every day, it leaves no time to actually do the work that your job requires. Most meetings generate follow-up work that needs to be completed at some point. But that work cannot be completed unless you actually take time to do it. For most people who have meetings during all possible work hours, they do their actual deep work after work hours…at night, early in the morning, on weekends. But they’re forgetting that when you say yes to something, you say no to something else in terms of your time. So saying yes to that night work is saying no to a healthy amount of sleep. Saying yes to that weekend work is saying no to time with your family. Saying yes to that early morning work is saying no to self-care time. None of us gets more than 24 hours a day, so I suggest to people that they schedule time on their calendars to complete their tasks.
Many successful people build time on their calendars to complete their tasks. Laura Mae Martin is an executive at Google who teaches other Google employees to make appointments with themselves to do their work. Brooke Castillo is a successful life coach who blocks her calendar every Monday for the tasks that she needs to complete that week. Amy Porterfield is an online marketing expert who also makes sure that she has time on her calendar to do all of the tasks that she has on her plate at any given time. They schedule meetings with themselves, and they treat those meetings as just as important as a meeting with another person. Because it’s during those times with themselves that they do the work that moves the needle. They’re completing the requests that come from the meetings and the emails. They’re working on the big projects that matter.
If you have a lot of tasks or a big project coming up, can you find time on your calendar in the days ahead to complete that work and block it off? If you have an assistant or other people who can schedule time on your calendar for you, you may want to have a conversation with them letting them know that you’re now blocking off time to complete your work during the day, and those blocks should be treated as just as inviolate as a meeting with a client except in cases of emergency (and brainstorm what might be possible emergencies). If you feel uncomfortable blocking time on your calendar for meetings with yourself, can you block the time without a subject, or simply call it networking, or give the meeting initials that remind you what you plan to work on during that time but won’t look like a meeting with yourself to anyone who might be monitoring you (like JSP standing for John Smith project). Your calendar is a symbolic representation of your life. If you take control of it and construct it to include all of the blocks you need to get your work done, including time with yourself to complete your tasks, then you can get closer to building the life that you want.
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Sincerely Yours,
Focus to Evolve Team