Time management is one of the most important life skills you can have. Ultimately, everyone has the same amount of time in a day. So how do some people accomplish what seems to be so much in the same amount of time as others? It all comes down to how you choose to spend and prioritize your time. As a student or a professional, calendar management can dramatically improve your life and help to decrease stress.
Managing your calendar comes in several shapes and forms. Here are 13 top tips for calendar management.
1. Create a Master Calendar
This may seem obvious, but it’s often overlooked. Some people like to write their appointments down in an agenda book. Others prefer digital calendars. It’s important to write down everything in one place. Using one calendar is useful so that you don’t double book appointments. If you have more than one calendar in different places, it can defeat the point of having a calendar in the first place. If you need to separate your calendars between work, social, and school, you can color code each type of appointment in your calendar.
2. Create a Routine
A foundation of time management is consistency. Building a routine can create habits. That way, you have an idea of what and when you need to be doing something. For example, you can build a morning routine that involves waking up, meditating, and then reading or studying. It helps to first list out the tasks you need to accomplish and then structure a routine based on your productivity levels. Mornings are often great times to be productive. You can schedule your critical thinking tasks for then. Try your routine out for at least a month to see if it’s working for you.
3. Batching
Batching is the process of grouping similar activities together in blocks of time. This promotes flow states and saves the time wasted to switch between tasks. For example, if you have several meetings regarding the same topic, then schedule those close to one another. If you have to respond to emails, schedule a specific time of day to do so. You can also batch time for breaks, lunch, and free time.
4. Optimization
If you’ve ever set up a work meeting on a digital calendar, chances are you know that it defaults to one hour blocks of time. However, there are many instances when an entire hour isn’t necessary for the meeting. Be sure to optimize your time by allocating the amount of time that is actually necessary for each task. As an example, if you have an introductory call, consider scheduling it for 15 minutes. If it’s an internal team meeting, try to limit it to 30 minutes.
5. Remove Back-to-Backs
Back-to-back meetings are hard for anyone to handle. When you have a meeting, you need some time after to review what was discussed and likely communicate it to others. You may even need to write a follow-up email. And then, before a meeting, you need time to prepare. That’s why back-to-back meetings can be draining and less than optimal. Try to have at least 15 minutes of free time before a meeting to give some breathing room.
6. Clear Clutter
Like physical spaces, calendars can become full of nonsense items. It helps to assess every item on your calendar and see that it actually has to be there. Many times, there are unnecessary standing meetings that can be canceled to free up some time.
7. Learn to Say No
If you’re required to attend a meeting from a higher up, then this doesn’t apply. But, if you are able to learn to say no, you can better manage your time. This is the same thing for scheduling social time. It’s okay to say no if you can’t make an event. People are often so busy saying yes, they leave no time to rest or recharge. While saying no isn’t always easy, it’s an important skill to master.
8. Schedule Yourself
Some people aren’t good at managing their own time, so assistants may help. While it’s nice to have someone provide options for timing, it’s also good practice to let scheduling still go through you. You may know something about your day that the person scheduling doesn’t.
9. Delegate Tasks
It’s ironic that some people in upper management have the hardest time managing themselves. This is because they often do not delegate tasks that could and should be passed on to others.
10. Meeting-Free Days
Filling up your calendar every day with meetings leaves you no time to do work. In business, you should try to create at least one meeting-free day a week. As a student, you can consider a meeting to be a social event. In the same vein, you can schedule one day for yourself to either get work done or relax.
11. Conduct Weekly Reviews
Have you ever assessed your own time? Whether you choose to use applications to monitor how you spend your time or take a look back at your calendar at the week’s end, it’s good to review your productivity. This way, you can make edits to your daily tasks to optimize and better manage your time.
12. Plan by Energy Level
When you review your weeks, also take note of how you feel. You can construct your calendar based around your energy levels. For example, if you have a lot of energy and feel like socializing in the evening, plan time with friends then. If you like quiet mornings and are most productive in the a.m., make your morning meeting-free.
13. Customization
You can create a customized calendar that fits your every need so that you can better manage your time. If you have the privilege of working somewhere with an in-house IT team, it may be worthwhile having them help create customizable and shareable calendars. Even without an IT team, you can customize a calendar easily through a website like Canva (or even by creating a hand-drawn calendar like below).
Everyone has different preferences. Here are some ideas for how to schedule your time.
Color coding: Code your tasks by subject. For example, you may have a work meeting, dinner with friends, and child’s basketball practice all in one day. It’s a good idea to assign different colors for each calendar, such as: “Work,” “Social,” and “Kids.”
Print calendars: Printing a calendar for the month or putting it up on the fridge with a magnet can help remind you of your to-dos.
Post-its: Perhaps you prefer to create a collage of Post-its (that can also be color coded). This is a good way to keep reminders in front of your face at your desk!
Reminders: Set up your digital calendar or reminders in your phone to alert you before events. You can set up multiple reminders, too.
Whiteboards: For college students especially, whiteboards are a really useful tool for organizing time. You can partition a whiteboard to serve multiple purposes, like writing your school schedule, upcoming deadlines, tests, and more. Then, each week or semester, you can simply erase it and start again.
Extra Tips for Executive Assistants
If you’re an executive assistant, calendar management is one of your main jobs. Here are some extra tips:
Set one-on-one time with your executive for check-ins
Sync and share the calendar
Stay on top of their time with reminders
Optimize timing based on meeting content and personnel
Tools to Remember
These tools are helpful sidekicks for calendar management:
Are you a student who needs to manage life’s responsibilities and school at the same time? Sure, it can be stressful. But have you considered earning your degree from an online institution?
Online colleges like the University of the People are designed such that students choose when and where they study. This way, you have more flexibility in balancing your school work, job, social life, and family.
The Time is Now
No matter where you are in the process of optimizing your time, these calendar management tips and tricks can help! As a student, employee, boss, parent, executive assistant or anything else, you can benefit from better managing your schedule.
At UoPeople, our blog writers are thinkers, researchers, and experts dedicated to curating articles relevant to our mission: making higher education accessible to everyone. Read More
