your future is organized, and your calendar agrees!

a while ago i told you about how i use the last 15 minutes of my friday to set my schedule for monday (memory refresher), but i haven’t told you about how i manage past monday. my calendar is my life line; if a task isn’t scheduled in my calendar, it pretty much means i’m not paying attention to it. on fridays, in addition to setting monday’s calendar, i’ll look at the rest of the week and schedule time for myself to do other tasks. these tasks don’t have to be accomplishment-driven, they can just be time set aside to remind myself to think about something.

when i read the post at time management ninja today it confirmed for me how helpful this process of scheduling appointments with myself actually is. the focus of the ninja article is on tough tasks, and that’s agreeably helpful. i also set appointments for myself to do mundane tasks. for example, i’ve set a recurring appointment to review approval slips every two weeks. every thursday afternoon i have an appointment with myself to read journal tables of contents, to see what’s new that week.

some of these “meetings with myself” i set in my calendar to display as “busy,” which usually means the task i’m focusing on is time sensitive. other meetings i will set as “tentative,” which mean i’d like to get to the task but wouldn’t be crushed if somebody needed me during that time. other meetings i set as “free,” and those are really just reminders for myself for what to focus on if i can. i don’t schedule every minute of my day because that would crush my soul.

one last tip: i do all my scheduling online in microsoft outlook; i don’t use paper for anything because it’s too easy to lose. if a task doesn’t get done at the original time i expected to focus on it, i can just drag it to a different place on the calendar and i know it will get taken care of eventually.

a sneak peek at tomorrow's schedule