5 Steps to Mastering Your Calendar and Increasing Your Productivity
Managing your calendar is a key skill for any executive. Here are five steps to running your days and weeks more strategically and productively.
The best strategy in the world is worthless unless the top executives have the time and focus needed to implement the required changes and initiatives. Too often, I find senior leaders overwhelmed with day-to-day operations, running around putting out fires and never making time to execute a strategic plan. And while everyone is capable and well-intentioned, progress just doesn't get made.
Here are five key steps I use to coach the executives I work with to improve management effectiveness and create space for new, more strategic tasks. While these five steps can take a few months to implement well, once you do, the effort quickly creates returns.
1. Know your highest-value activities
The first thing any executive must do is know where they create value for the organization. Maybe it's in developing strategic plans, maybe it's setting high-level technical architecture, maybe it's developing supplier partnerships, maybe it's selling to key prospects. Most executives have two to three fortes that create exceptionally more value for the organization than anything else.
This isn't what the executive spends the most time on. It's about value creation. Even if it's an activity that happens quickly and easily for the executive, it should be what directly or indirectly generates revenue and profit for the business. Often times this requires getting feedback from other senior leaders, customers, supplies, etc.
2. Discover your natural cycles
Humans are not machines. We have natural cycles of energy and focus, and interests. The most basic is the sleep/wake cycle that everyone goes through daily. There are other cycles that happen over the course of a day, the week, the month and even longer. Identifying, understanding, and optimizing these cycles is key to productivity.
Start by looking at your natural day. When do you naturally wake up and go to sleep? Are you a lark or a night owl? Then consider weekly cycles: are you naturally fresher on Mondays or do you hit your stride mid-week? You can also identify patterns around travel and other events. Maybe you get energized and productive just before a trip or maybe you know you're jet-lagged the day after a long flight and need to plan accordingly.
While you might not be able to completely change the external factors in your life, you can plan many activities according to these high and low points. If you're a lark, you might want to do your tasks requiring energy and focus in the morning. If you're a night owl, you might want to do these in the evening. Map the right activities to the right time and don't waste your high-value periods.
3. Create core time blocks
Start by creating blocks of time for your high-value activities and put them at the most opportune times in your schedule. This might be a few blocks in the morning early in the week or it might be afternoons mid-week. Think about the time of day, the days of the week, and what your ideal calendar should look like.
The point is to figure out your natural best times for focused work, meetings, exercise, eating, family time, etc., and then work to align your schedule and daily work plan to leverage these cycles, rather than trying to fight them. While it might take some time to iron things out, if you can create better alignment, you'll quickly see vastly improved results.
4. Protect your high-quality time
Once you've identified your high-value tasks and have put them in your highly productive time periods in your schedule, protect them ruthlessly. Do whatever you need to do to move everything else around those slots, and don't let things interfere and disrupt them.
I have executives who get a coworking office or go to a local coffee shop a few times per week to work on their high-value activities during peak performance times. They turn off their phone and put on headphones with focus music so they can't be found and don't get bothered. Most of them find that the three to four hours they spend in this mode creates 80-90 percent of their value for the week.
5. Delete, delegate, defer
With your task focus identified and your time blocks in your calendar, the next step is to get rid of everything else so you can free up more time to do high-value work. For all other tasks, and any new task that comes up, ask yourself three questions in this order: can I delete this?, can I delegate this? and finally, can I defer this until later? Being ruthless about these questions will remove many items from your plate.
Growing and scaling a business isn't hard when you have the right strategy and the discipline to focus on the right activities. What's hard is understanding and working within our natural limits and using that time strategically. It also requires us to prioritize key items and to say no to many things that pull our attention. Few teams master this quickly, but those who do will see the results and typically turn out to be the winners in their industry.
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